MAGICAL REALISM AND THE ERASURE OF THE WORLDS IN YANN MARTEL’S LIFE OF PI IN POSTMODERNISM PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Life of Pi is a novel written by a Canadian writer. Life of Pi is a story of Pi surviving the Pacific for 227 days. In general, this research discusses the literary strategies used in Life of Pi in presenting the postmodernism aspects by analyzing the presentations of magical realism and the erasure of the worlds in the novel. Brian McHale’s perspective on postmodernist fiction is applied in this research to solve the ontological problems of the construction of the worlds. This research is a qualitative research, while a documentary technique is used to collect the data needed for this research. There are two kinds of data used in this research; primary data and secondary data. The primary data of this research are any kind of information and facts about the construction of worlds and the representation of postmodern culture in the object of this research, while the secondary data are any kind of facts and information, which are taken from the secondary sources, about magical realism and postmodern culture that support the analysis of the primary data. This research uses inductive method in analyzing the data; that the discussion goes from the specific to the general, from particular to a whole group of ideas, phenomena, or situations. This research has found that in Life of Pi, magical realism does not only become the cause of the erasure of the worlds, by the way of making the character resist the magical events and objects. It also appears to be the effect of the erasure itself. Therefore, by presenting magical realism and the erasure of the worlds, Life of Pi raised the problems of modes of being or the ontological questions that mostly appear in postmodernist fictions. Furthermore, this research concludes that Yann Martel, through his writing Life of Pi, reflects the postmodern culture of the “anything goes” by presenting the event of Pi taming the tiger, projecting three religions in one person and not creating an ending for Life of Pi.