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The Life of Pi
January 2005
Pi begins his life trained in Hinduism. As a young man he embraces a form of Christianity, and the Islamic faith. He embraces all three uncritically as if they were equally viable belief systems. The only criticism he has is the exclusiveness of each one. The book seems critical of the notion that one must choose between religious options; i.e. Hindu, Christian or Muslim. Pi’s defense is, "I just want to love God." This is classic pluralism. That's the first part of the story.
In the second part of the story Pi is stranded in a lifeboat for 6 plus months. The reader begins to doubt that Pi will ever be rescued from his lifeboat adrift in the seaÑhis only companions being a few wild animals that were being transported from a zoo in India to the USA. But when Pi is rescued, insurance agents quiz him concerning the shipwreck in order to settle liability issues. He tells them the fantastic story that the book purports to accurately record. But his auditors refuse to believe him.
The second version he tells does not correspond with what happened on the boat, but is a very dry and uneventful account of what could have happened. After inventing the second scenario he says, "Neither makes a factual difference to you." The Japanese investigators confess, "That's true."
"The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no?" In this statement, the author is affirming his belief that we superimpose our own subjective ideas on the way things are and "in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?"
Pi says, "So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer?" Then he says, "And so it goes with God."
When you apply this philosophy to the first part of the book, (Pi's search for God), I think you have this: it should make no factual difference to us whether Hinduism, Christianity, or the Muslim story is true. Pick the one you like: the one that strikes your personal fancy. Either way, you choose God.
When considering the three accounts of the way things are (Hinduism, Christianity, or Muslim), the real question for me is, does it make a factual difference? And with Jesus raised from the dead, it does make a difference. Mr. Martel still has Jesus in a grave somewhere in India.
One final point. The author has said that chapters 21 and 22, while short, are at the core of the novel. He refers to them as, "Dry yeastless factuality," which is a reference to a view of life void of the divine, an idea illustrated at the end of the book by the two versions of the story Pi tells the Japanese investigators. He is asking us, "What story are you going to embrace?”
Steven Lloyd