I don’t know how many folks on the board have read this, but I found it to be an absolutely incredible book. I loved every inch of it, but of course it leaves an ambiguity at the end, which story is true, the story with the animals that is told throughout most of the book, or the story he told the Japanese investigators at the end? Is it supposed to be ambiguous< even that i am not sure about.
Personally, I think the story he told about his mother and the cook, etc. is the truth and the rest is just analogy (is that the right word in this case?). Why do I dis-believe the animal story? The book actually does a good job of making us believe the animal story, but there was one thing I did not buy, that Pi oould be on the raft two and a half days and not know there was a fully grown Benagl Tiger on board.
What is the point of the more fantastical story, well I would think it is to show the more animalistic nature people take when they find themselves in such extreme circumstances. But also, what it is that setsa apart, our inginuety, but more importantly our faith. Pi had a lot of religious faith, some might even argue too much (indeed some do argue that explicitely in the book).
There is frequent outright comparisons and contrasts between human and animal, from the defense of zoos, to the scene where Pi imagines himself talking to the Tiger. And the journey on the raft highlights that the line separating the two is razor thin.
I hope I am not talking to myself, here. I plan on reading this book again, soon. I find, often, whether it a book or a movie, with a “surprise” ending, that a second reading actually is more illuminating. I hope so.
I don’t think that’s the main point at all. The main point as I saw it was you were supposed to believe the main story because it was more “interesting” and had more “wonder.” Just like you’re supposed to believe in God and all that because it’s more “interesting” and has more “wonder.” I’m an atheist, so I utterly reject such a premise – I do not judge how true something is based on how cool it is. Even if I were a believer, I’d find such a view rather insulting. I’ve got a brain; surely it can be used for more than just coming up with neato stories.
Besides, had the book been about the cook, the boy, and his mom stranded on a raft, that would have been a neat story, too. Just like how Big Bang cosmology and intense study of the universe is as neat a story as angels and devils.
All that being said, I did enjoy the book and have recommended it to a number of people, with the words, “I wholly disagree with the author’s thesis, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Read it.”
Me, I believed the animal story was supposed to be the true one. What I failed to understand is why either story was supposed to make me believe in God. A good yarn, but nothing more.
Having seen Yann Martel in person and heard him speak about what he was trying to accomplish with Life of Pi, here are his thoughts on the whole “this story will make you believe in God” aspect that everyone seems to focus upon.
Essentially (and I’m paraphrasing here), Martel requires the reader to make a “leap of faith,” so to speak, in order to believe the story that Pi’s telling the reader. The idea that a twelve-year-old boy could be stranded on a life raft with a tiger, a hyena, a zebra and an ape isn’t too difficult to believe; okay, says Martel, but can you accept that Pi could survive for more than a week without becoming cat food? Possibly, says the reader - he is the son of a zookeeper, after all. Well, what about the scene in which Pi, half-blind, runs into another raft crossing the Atlantic, also manned by someone half-blind? Could you accept that? And can you accept the fanciful meercat island?
The narrative, as told by Pi, becomes less and less plausible as the story goes on. At the end of the novel, Martel provides us with a choice - we can either accept the more rational explanation that Pi proposes to the Japanese, or we can choose to believe in what Pi’s told us over the course of the novel. The latter, I believe, requires much more “faith” to accept than the former, and I think it’s the mechanism behind how we come to believe the unfathomable and unknowable, in the face of rationality and logic, that Martel’s working with.
(The cool thing about Martel is that he’s completely open to alternate interpretations of the novel. Like the guy who told him, with a straight face, that the book was an allegory on stamp collecting.)
I’m with Gyrate here. It was enjoyable, a bit long at times.
On some level, I would like to wrap the story up neatly: the tiger was the vicious, unvegetarian, unreligious, animalistic part of Pi. He “tamed” the tiger after the tiger dispensed the hyena (the Frenchman) because he knew that he had to do that after killing him. That the whole story is a coping mechanism to deal with his mother’s murder, his eventual murder of the Frenchman, and 200 days+ alone at sea. But I don’t think it it really works all the way through.
Beyond that it is a good yarn. As an atheist, it didn’t bring me closer to believing in God. Actually no part of it made me even think about faith, and I thought that the line about “make you believe in God” was a little misplaced.
With all due respect to Mr. Martel and his fine story, it’s hardly a profound statement to point out that storytelling requires a certain level of “suspension of disbelief” on the part of the reader/listener for the duration of the story. It is the nature of stories that strange and interesting things often happen; if the story were of a man in a lifeboat by himself who did nothing but fish and distill some water for 200+ days, it would have been a much less compelling tale to read (“Day 147: Caught and ate some fish, drank some water, looked for land, slept.”).
That doesn’t mean I’m willing to believe any of it actually happened, only that I’m willing to give the storyteller the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the story. I don’t find the meercat island episode any less difficult to accept in the context of the story than I do, say, the more fantastic adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, or Italo Calvino’s cloven Viscount, or Salman Rushdie’s second moon. So unless Martel is suggesting that God is both fictitious and fictional, the assertion doesn’t really stand.
The whole meerkat island episode blew apart that believing in God thing that was supposed to happen. I’d been looking forward to seeing how it might be accomplished, as I’m quite the atheist. The author had been doing a pretty good job up to that point, advancing his case a reasonable chunk at a time and then the island was just too incredible. One or two parts of the island I could have taken, but all of it put together was too much fantasy, too much of a leap of faith for anyone who wasn’t determined to believe. After that, I found myself disillusioned with the whole book and just wanted it to be over.
I plan on reading this book again, soon. I find, often, whether it a book or a movie, with a “surprise” ending, that a second reading actually is more illuminating. I hope so.