Myth, Allegory, and Modern Fable in Life of Pi

This article offers a sustained critical reading of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi through the intersecting narrative modes of myth, allegory, and the modern fable. It argues that the novel’s global resonance derives from its reactivation of premodern symbolic forms within a contemporary literary context shaped by postmodern skepticism, epistemological plurality, and trauma. This essay demonstrates how Martel mobilises myth, allegory and fable as ethically and aesthetically productive strategies for negotiating belief, suffering, and narrative truth in a secular age. Situating Life of Pi within traditions of mythic storytelling, allegorical survival narratives, and animal fable, the article contends that the novel redefines the fable as an open-ended ethical form that transfers interpretive responsibility to the reader. Through extended close textual analysis and critical dialogue with scholarship on postmodern narrative, trauma, and human–animal relations, the essay positions Life of Pi as a significant twenty-first-century intervention into debates about the function of storytelling itself.