It seemed that the story stopped like this, but the writer in the novel did not believe in that exciting and hardly believable story。 Meanwhile, he pointed that banana could not float on water and asked Pi to tell the story again。 Due to the writer’s query, Pi Patel told the writer another story, which is too cruel to be accepted。 Actually, there was no animal in the lifeboat but a cook, a sailor who had an injured leg, Pi and Pi’s mother。 The cook killed the sailor first and then ate him。 After some time, the French cook could not bear hunger, so he wanted to kill Pi。 Pi’s mother protected Pi from hurting of the cook, which made the cook angry and killed Pi’s mother。 This had reached the end of Pi’s forbearance, Pi killed the cook and ate him in the end。 Ultimately, all the people died but only Pi survived the suffering。 The story ended with the listener’s shocked face, Pi asked him which story he believed in and the writer answered, “The first one。” Then Pi said,“So you did believe in God。” (Yann Martel, 2001: 223)

Comparing these two stories, we can also find somewhere is unreasonable and thereby catches a version that you believe in。 Finding out the metaphors in the novel is the way to understand the real story。 This paper is written in terms of metaphors analyses of the environment, characters’ names and animal nature。 We can be convinced that metaphor takes a predominant role in describing characters’ quality, fate and announcing main idea of the novel, where we can also feel the writer’s brilliant design and abundant imagination。

The study of this paper has great significance:First, many metaphors appear in the novel Life of Pi。 The current researches help to analyze the deep cultural meaning of this novel so readers can understand the author and the novel better。

Also, in the wake of the globalization, the current research is of great benefits to the interaction and intercommunication among disparate cultures, the reduction of cultural conflicts as well, which will certainly promote the cross-cultural awareness and reduce the cultural conflicts。

1。3 A Brief Introduction of Metaphors

1。3。1 Overview of Metaphors 来自~优尔、论文|网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766-

In the west, it has been a long time that researchers began to study metaphors。 Shu Dingfang, a famous scholar of China, mentions that studies of metaphor in the west can be pided into three stages from the range and method of metaphor research。 The three stages are rhetoric research from Aristotle in the ancient Greek to 1930s, semantics research of metaphor from 1930s to 1970s and interdisciplinary study of metaphor from 1970s to today。 The book Metaphors We Live By written by American linguists, Lakoff and Johnson, designated that studies of metaphor had gotten into cognitive approach from conventional figures of speech and semantics researches。 Lakoff and Johnson put forward Conceptual Metaphor Theory and deemed that metaphor exists in people’s daily life。

Metaphor is an important mode of thinking and perceiving which leads people to distinguish and grasp the world。 The essence of metaphor is to realize and experience a kind of thing by another kind of thing。 Metaphor is creative and it leads us to an infinite unknown world from the limited known world。