Performing Humans and Flesh Eating Boys: Deconstructing the Human/Non-Human Animal Divide in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy Anonymous College

The boundary between the human and the non-human animal is tested now more than ever with the prevailing field of Animal studies. Traditional theories in philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Descartes that regard the human and the non-human animal as categorically and essentially different are now questioned and undermined. Both Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy and Yan Martel’s Life of Pi traverse the “gulf” between the human and the non-human animal and thus highlight how these are not separate and complete categories. Both texts examine relationships and similarities between humans and non-human animals through the presentation of environment-making, training, ‘uncivilised’ brutal nature and language and communication to show the ways in which categories are blurred and transgressed. This essay will discuss how Kafka and Martel’s texts both challenge the notion of categorical separateness based on an essential difference between the human and the non-human animal as they reveal the way in which this boundary unravelled.

Yan Martel’sLife of Pi begins in a zoo in Pondicherry. John Berger argues that zoos encourage the othering of the animal in the human imagination and thus it is unsurprising that Pi presents his...