What Story Do We Choose? Reflections on Life of Pi

Warning: I am going to ruin the book. If you have the slightest thought of reading it on your own, do so before reading this blog.






Life of Pi is a novel by Yann Martel about an Indian boy who grows up the son of a zoo keeper. His family decides to move from India to Canada, and dies in a shipwreck en route. Pi (short for Piscine) survives in a life boat which coincidentally saves a hyena, orangutan, and adult Bengal tiger. Pi, having grown up in a zoo, is quite versed in animal psychology, and manages to survive 270+ days at sea. The hyena and orangutan are not as fortunate.

Pi retells his story in harrowing detail. He recounts how he keeps himself and his pet tiger alive, distilling water and catching fish and turtles to survive on. His account bears an adequate amount of realism until the end where the story proceeds to become more and more unbelievable. Eventually, as Pi is going blind from hunger and seems to be losing his mind, they happen upon another castaway (a Frenchman) in another lifeboat who attempts to kill Pi, but does not account for the hungry tiger behind him. After the tiger dines upon the Frenchman, they stumble upon a perfect island, where Pi can enjoy a vegetarian diet to his heart's content while his tiger can feast upon docile meerkats that inhabit the island. Eventually they leave out of necessity on the lifeboat and land in Mexico. While recovering in a Mexican hospital, Pi is visited by emissaries of the ship company, seeking answers as to the ships sinking. They find none, but listen skeptically to Pi's story. They drive their doubts until Pi tells them another story of what happened.

The alternate story: the life boat was actually inhabited by an invalid sailor (zebra), his mother (the orangutan), an evil French cook (hyena) and himself (guess who). The cook greedily kills and eats the sailor, and a while later brutally kills Pi's mother in front of him as Pi watches at a distance on a makeshift raft. Pi later crawls aboard and while eating a turtle with the cook, stabs him to death and vengefully, viciously eats him.

At the end of the interview, Pi questions the representatives which story they prefer. There is no criminal trial, only opinion. So, which would they choose. The book ends with the account of the ships sinking, which concludes that Pi survived his ordeal with a tiger aboard the boat.

So, which do we choose? This reminded me of the movie Doubt in that it seems to be offering up a parable. The fact is that parables have no right or wrong answers, only that they require us to answer with our own verdict. And it is our verdict that matters, since this reveals each of us to our self. There are plenty of reasons to choose one story over the other, and that's the point. Choosing is the mirror that reveals our own face.

So, allow me to explain what I've seen in my own choices. At first, the end of this book bothered me. I struggle with the idea that religion (the story) can or should serve as a mask to the horridness of reality. A boy who watches his mother stabbed to death and eaten is hardly served by mythologizing his experience. Perhaps, in Martel's words, this makes me guilty of clinging to "dry, yeastless factuality" but, in true existentialist form, I find it better to deal with reality in all of its grotesque and brutal contours than to package it in marketable, yet false, legends.

Yet, I can point out also, that the word "false" in my previous sentence assumes quite a lot. It is factual (in a dry, yeastless sort of way) that the story of four humans on a boat is more believable. It is my own preference to always wants to start from "what really happened". Yet in doing so, it is true that the facts stand there, lifeless and without meaning. It's not that our myths replace them, but that only in such stories can we see the meaning therein. Personally, this represents to me what religion is coming to mean in my life. There is the reality that I perceive, then there is the meaning that I find.

As a sidenote, I'd like to mention my interpretation of the island mentioned in the story. Pi stumbles upon the perfect island, but realizes later that at night all life has to escape to the trees or his lifeboat. The reason for this is that at night, the algae that compose the island become carnivorous and eat all animals that cannot escape. This is confirmed when Pi picks the fruit of the algae and finds that it enshrines human teeth. Personally I find this to be a commentary on Utopian ideals. Whenever our stories, religions or ideologies offer us a perfect world, their perfection is the result of the death of others. Utopias are carnivorous, even though in the day they appear benign. At least that's what I think of it.

At first I thought I didn't like the book very much, but the more I ponder it, the more I enjoy it. A good read, even if I've just drained it of any element of surprise.