Thank you, many people have recommended this book to me. Now I know I don’t have to bother with it.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
Unless you can be Jedi Betty White. In that case, totally be Jedi Betty White!
The elegance of LIFE OF PI
Is the meditation on why
It need not seem odd
To find that there’s God
Reflected in a tiger’s eye.
Bravo!
I also think it is interesting reading atheistic views of the story. The author is a person of faith, himself.
I’m not sure where I read it, but I could have sworn that I read that Martel came to be a person of faith while writing “Life of Pi”. In a lot of ways, the story speaks more to mainline Protestants than fundamentalists, I think, due to the co-existence of the irrational with the rational, and that the irrational isn’t necessarily bad.
Remember that Pi was telling this story to an American man. At the end of the
story, the American asked Pi if there was a message in it for Pi or an epiphany
for him. Pi responded that he had no conclusion to make and no “lessons learned”
from his personal saga.
I missed the first scenes of the film. I suppose the American incented the
storytelling by asking Pi what it was that caused him to leave India.
Cheers, 10-25-13.
Beginning of the story was the American asking about God, and the first Indian he spoke to said if you want a story about god, talk to that dirty liar, pi.
Merged two threads about the movie (grude’s and LinusK’s).
David H Singanas writes:
> Remember that Pi was telling this story to an American man.
Superhal writes:
> Beginning of the story was the American asking about God, and the first Indian
> he spoke to said if you want a story about god, talk to that dirty liar, pi.
Canadian, not American.
The point (of the book, I haven’t seen the movie) is that it’s all about belief. It’s about the religions that the main character believes in, and it’s also about how much of the story the reader is willing to believe (as parts of the story get a bit less plausible as it goes on.) There’s also the fact that at the beginning, it’s presented as a true story, which also ties into the “belief” theme. And then there’s the reveal about the whole lifeboat story at the end (I won’t spoil it), and whether the reader believes which version of the story.
I didn’t understand the book either, until I realized that it was all about belief (how much you’re willing to believe, etc.)
Good movies are the ones that make you laugh but don’t make you think.
Good movies entertain you and don’t make you lose any sleep.
Great movies are the ones you have to think about for days or even
weeks. Great movies will disturb or upset the viewers in a good way or a
negative way. LIFE OF PI was just that sort of film.
Cheers, 10-26-13
[quote=“SenorBeef, post:37, topic:653757”]
“I’ve always been perplexed that religious people seem to react to this movie as if it’s affirming and validating their faith, that it’s fundamentally a story that supports a belief in god.”
Well said, SenorBeef. Religious folk read secular literature subjectively IMHO.
Non-religious folk, that is to say folk without an ideological agenda, read
literature objectively. To repeat myself in an earlier post, LIFE OF PI can send
out positive or negatives vibes on different levels of abstraction. This is why
it is a great script and a great screenplay. It is also a great children’s story at a
very fundamental level, because each human and animal has a distinct
individuality and karma.
Singanas, 10-26-13
Very nicely put! I’m totally going to pretend I came up with it in the future.
Life of Pi is one of my all time favorite books in large part because - contrary to the author’s stated intent - it made me an atheist! I was taking a break from studying theology in graduate school and struggling with the question of what it means to believe and whether it can be justified when I first read the book. Frylock’s statement of the book’s theme is exactly the approach I was trying to hold on to, and the book laid out precisely the case for religious belief I had been trying to make for myself, only far more beautifully and engagingly than I ever could have. And I found it completely inadequate. Seeing the best possible version of my own argument fail allowed me to accept my loss (or rejection) of faith and start rebuilding my worldview without a lot of the anger and anxiety that would have otherwise accompanied the process.
I’ve since shared the book with an atheist book club I’m in, and I was surprised to find that pretty much everyone there agreed with my take on it, finding it a captivating and (relatively) compelling explication of the liberal religious perspective that nevertheless fails to be convincing. I haven’t had the opportunity to discuss the book (or the movie, which I thought was excellent) with any religious believers, but I’d really like to know how they would respond to what I see as the obvious weaknesses in the argument.
I remain some weird kind of believer so far. What are the weaknesses you’re interested in talking about?
Intriguing! Personally, I loved the first third, accepted the second third, and really hated the last third – the dopey magical island – and bitterly hated the epilogue with the two Japanese insurance investigators.
The island bit left me with the sense that the author was insulting my intelligence, deliberately and overtly. “So, you were so stupid, you bought the tiger and the lifeboat stuff? Just how stupid are you, then? Let’s find out…” I found this to be a violation of the implicit contract between a writer and a reader, that the two should show at least some respect for one another.
I’ve shown it to my college students this past year, and they responded to it with lots of comments, questions, challenges, epiphanies, realizations, wanting to know more about allegories, etc.–and this isn’t even a Lit. Class. It’s comp/research. The film has yielded some great results in discussions and some excellent papers. Some students said they wanted to read the book now that they’ve seen the film.
I’d call it a successful choice.
Sorry to take so long to reply. My initial thought on reading this was that I probably know your theology well enough (and it’s probably close enough to what was my own theology) that we wouldn’t get anywhere interesting, but I see some interesting parallels with your current thread on the historicity of Jesus that give me a good place to start.
Of course, for most believers, the biggest issue would be the claim that their assertions do not conform to the norm of correspondence with fact, and I was particularly interested in whether that would cause them to reject the argument in the novel.
Brushing that aside, I think you can see that your Jesus thread seems to raise the possibility that it actually matters whether Jesus existed historically or not. Not to say that it’s the only thing that matters in evaluating Christianity, but merely that it does matter whether assertions about Jesus correspond to facts.
In Life of Pi it also seems to matter whether the story Pi tells corresponds to the facts. The Japanese Transport Ministry men were willing to accept Pi’s animal story, but only after they were certain that it didn’t obscure any information about the sinking of the Tsimtsum. (BTW, I didn’t know until just now that “tzimtsum” is the kabbalistic doctrine [which I had heard of] that God, being infinite, had to first withdraw or constrict Himself in order to create an ontological “space” for the universe, that is, to allow for the existence of not-God!) In other words, they had to know the factual story as well. And one can easily imagine cases in which the factual story might matter even more. The transport men were unconcerned with what happened to Richard Parker after he disappeared into the Mexican jungle, but the Mexican government might be less aloof, especially if there was concern about people and animals being attacked in the area.
At the very least, it can be very important that people be clear about which of their assertions are factual and which are not. Pi himself, however, seemed reluctant to make the distinction. And so, I find, it goes with God. I was a liberal Christian who tried hard to avoid supernaturalism, but I found that assertions have a way of become beliefs, and beliefs invariably become assertions about the facts of the world. I remember watching a video of Richard Dawkins in conversation with a high-ranking Anglican bishop, in which they seemed ready to agree on almost everything, with the bishop carefully explaining that it was the meaning behind the biblical stories that mattered rather than any historical occurrence. But when Dawkins pressed him on the Resurrection, the bishop demurred. It wasn’t important, he wanted to say, whether one believed in a literal resurrection, but it seemed vitally important to the bishop that a literal resurrection be allowed as a possibility. Maybe this was just PR, but the bishop seemed sincere. And nearly every liberal Christian I spoke to privately seemed to have the same concerns. However much they might insist that belief in a literal resurrection was beside the point, none of them could bring themselves to actually doubt it. Sometimes the sophistry on the point became almost amusing: I remember debating with a good friend at seminary whether a certain theology professor who kept stating that the Resurrection happened “outside of history” meant by that phrase to affirm or deny that an actual event took place. No amount of questioning during or after class elicited any clarity from the professor, and my friend eventually had to concede that at the very least, the professor wasn’t affirming very much!
Liberal religion, IOW, seems very much built on a foundation of ignoring or erasing the norm of conformation to facts for both assertions and beliefs. And that seems to me to be a very dangerous position.
To concur with Smithee,
It seems that TLOP is saying: “If you have to choose to believe in the feel good version or the feel neutral/bad version, pick the feel good one”.
Say, if someone you loved died, if it makes you feel better to think that they’re still alive in Heaven and that it was part of a greater plan, go ahead and believe so.
Is this an accurate portrayal of the position?
If so, I do wonder how one can keep a clear distinction between the “I believe this because it makes me feel good” and the “I believe this because that’s the most likely probability based on the evidence available”. Religions do not have a monopoly on wishful thinking but TLOP seems to say that it’s their core competence.
If you believe something because you have calculated that believing it will make you feel better, I wonder how much benefit you can get from this instrumental belief. If I consciously chose to believe something specifically because I thought doing so would make me feel good, there would always be that little nagging voice in my head saying :“No, you don’t really believe it, you’re just making yourself believe it because you want to feel good.” which would pretty much destroy whatever benefit of that belief I might accrue. Believing seems to be rather like loving in that you can expose yourself more or less to influences one way or another but you just can’t make yourself wholeheartedly believe an assertion or love someone, no matter how much you tell yourself to.
Also, does this line of argument not warrant pretty much any kind of nonsense belief? The belief in a tiger is used as a stand-in for God but wouldn’t elves or UFOs or unicorns work just as well? Couldn’t the author have told a story (that will make you believe in unicorns) about a boy who struggles with elves on a lifeboat and ultimately befriends them? I bet the religious would rather take umbrage to that movie.
Skammer,
You use the word “true” in a way that befuddles me. Could you tell me how the tiger story is true? What’s the difference between an assertion which is true and an assertion which is deeply true?
As an aside, it’s not widely known that Pi was quite nerdy in school. His friends kept telling him, “Pi, you are square!”