Life
of Pi is a story about struggling to survive through
seemingly insurmountable odds. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the little
lifeboat don’t simply acquiesce to their fate: they actively fight against it.
Pi abandons his lifelong vegetarianism and eats fish to sustain himself. Orange
Juice, the peaceful orangutan, fights ferociously against the hyena. Even the
severely wounded zebra battles to stay alive; his slow, painful struggle
vividly illustrates the sheer strength of his life force. As Martel makes clear
in his novel, living creatures will often do extraordinary, unexpected, and
sometimes heroic things to survive. However, they will also do shameful and
barbaric things if pressed. The hyena’s treachery and the blind Frenchman’s
turn toward cannibalism show just how far creatures will go when faced with the
possibility of extinction. At the end of the novel, when Pi raises the
possibility that the fierce tiger, Richard Parker, is actually an aspect of his own personality, and
that Pi himself is responsible for some of the horrific events he has narrated,
the reader is forced to decide just what kinds of actions are acceptable in a
life-or-death situation.
Life
of Pi is a story within a story within a story. The
novel is framed by a (fictional) note from the author, Yann Martel, who
describes how he first came to hear the fantastic tale of Piscine Molitor Patel. Within the framework of
Martel’s narration is Pi’s fantastical first-person account of life on the open
sea, which forms the bulk of the book. At the end of the novel, a transcript
taken from an interrogation of Pi reveals the possible “true” story
within that story: that there were no animals at all, and
that Pi had spent those 227 days with other
human survivors who all eventually perished, leaving only himself.
Pi, however, is not a liar. ‘Each
story contains a different kind of truth. One version may be factually true,
but the other has an emotional or thematic truth that the other cannot
approach. Throughout the novel, Pi expresses disdain for rationalists who only
put their faith in “dry, yeastless factuality,” when stories—which can amaze
and inspire listeners, and are bound to linger longer in the imagination—are,
to him, infinitely superior.
The “true” events of Pi’s sea
voyage are too horrible to contemplate directly: any young boy would go insane
if faced with the kinds of acts Pi (indirectly) tells his integrators he has
witnessed. By recasting his account as an incredible tale about humanlike
animals, Pi doesn’t have to face the true cruelty human beings are actually
capable of. Similarly, by creating the character of Richard Parker, Pi can
disavow the ferocious, violent side of his personality that allowed him to
survive on the ocean. Even this is not, technically, a lie in Pi’s eyes. He
believes that the tiger-like aspect of his nature and the civilized, human
aspect stand in tense opposition and occasional partnership with one another,
just as the boy Pi and the tiger Richard Parker are both enemies and allies.
Nature of
Religious Belief
Life
of Pi begins with an old man in Pondicherry who
tells the narrator, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.”
Storytelling and religious belief are two closely linked ideas in the novel. On
a literal level, each of Pi’s three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and
Islam, come with its own set of tales and fables, which are used to spread the
teachings and illustrate the beliefs of the faith. Pi enjoys the wealth of
stories, but he also senses that, as Father Martin assured him was true of
Christianity, each of these stories might simply be aspects of a greater,
universal story about love.
Stories
and religious beliefs are also linked in Life of Pi because
Pi asserts that both require faith on the part of the listener or devotee.
Surprisingly for such a religious boy, Pi admires atheists. To him, the
important thing is to believe in something, and
Pi can appreciate an atheist’s ability to believe in the absence of God with no
concrete proof of that absence. Pi has nothing but disdain, however, for
agnostics, who claim that it is impossible to know either way, or who therefore
refrain from making a definitive statement on the question of God. Pi sees this
as evidence of a shameful lack of imagination. To him, agnostics who cannot
make a leap of faith in either direction are like listeners who cannot
appreciate the non-literal truth a fictional story might provide.
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