Use of Silence and Sound in the Novel ‘Life of Pi’ and its Movie Version: An Insight

Abstract

It is known fact that both the novels and its films, adapt different modes to communicate and bring out the same story. A novel makes use of words, clauses, phrases, sentences and paragraphs which bring out the meaning in an organized order. Movie on the other hand uses the logic of image which is combined with speech, gestures, music, dialogue, colors, movemelit, costume and many others to make it more effective. lt should be noted that a movie is not always about sound but silence also. But silence play s an important i ole to a very great extent. Silence and sound are two very different and contradictory aspects. In fact silence has always been an integral part of any films for that matter. It is true that silence has branched out over the years. In this paper priority is to make an effort to view both silence and sound as modes to understand and explore the themes and the ways in which they bring out the stop. Here both novel and its adapted version will be closely analyzed to understand the correlation of silence and its various interactions between silence and the sound, music and dialogue and how sound can co-exist with silence to make the impact more convincing. This paper is a combined study of music, sound, visuals and silence to understand their effects in inducing emotions. An effort will be made to understand the equilibrium connection between silence and sound in all forms used in the novel Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel for which he won the ‘Booker Prize Award’, and the film version directed by Ang Lee, which won many awards which includes ‘Academy Award for Best Music and ‘Academy Award for Best Visual Effects’.