Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Yes, after reading this book I did put a banana in a pot of water to see if it would float. It did.

I enjoyed this book. Martel is a great storyteller. It takes a genius indeed to make a story of a boy alone at sea with only a tiger, after the cargo ship moving his family's zoo from India to Canada sank, seem not not only captivating but also believable! At the beginning the narrator claims the story will "Make you believe in God!" It's great fiction, great imagery, great metaphors... but the kind of ending I hate. The kind that makes you question the whole story you just read. ((spoiler alert)) At the book's end, two men come to investigate how the ship sank, and ask Pi about his experience. When he recounts his survival story on the lifeboat alone with the tiger, the men ask for a story that "does not contradict reality." At this point, Pi tells another story involving other people being on the lifeboat with him initially, and shares how each dies in turn- no zoo animals at all.

Of course neither recounting helps the men figure out how the cargo ship sank in the middle of the Pacific, but the men find the latter story more believable. Pi asks, "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? Which story is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?" The men think about it and choose the story with the animals. That is the "better" story.

Pi responds, "So it is with God."

My response after getting this far was to stop and say aloud, "What a bunch of postmodern garbage!" To me, Martel seems to be mocking the idea of believing in God- making it seem like believing is just choosing a story that one prefers. It sounds like he's saying that truth doesn't matter, if there is a story that is more pleasing, more convincing, or perhaps more comfortable to believe for a particular person. The men at the end of the story preferred the story of a boy surviving heroically by training a tiger alone in a lifeboat. That was easier to believe than the horrible story of cannibalism and a boy watching his mother be murdered.

Well, here are more reflections from someone else with more organized thoughts. Generally I agree with him and he says it better than me: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/the-life-of-pi-by-yann/page-2/#ixzz1XbHvC3ae

Here was a book that was supposed to make you believe in God (or so the cover claims). Here was a book that took faith seriously, didn’t hold to that hard materialist worldview. After reading it, however, I think Martel substitutes a hard materialist viewpoint for a mystical post-modern view of the role of religion.

This ending weakened the power of the book for me. I find it hard to read this story any other way then to assume that the horrific story of murder and cannibalism is the actual story of what physically happened. What the author seems to be saying is that God is a better story. That religion is a tool to see life in a new light. That all things being equal isn’t it better to believe in the mystery and beauty of a wonderful story? Like a great deal of post-modernist thinking there is kernel of truth in this view. People of faith know that a cold materialist view of life fails to explain what it means to be human. It fails to explain art and beauty, love and wisdom, a meaning beyond ourselves. Faith surely encompasses tradition and experiences that can’t be tied down to cold hard facts. But what is missing is truth. Nowhere in the story does the issue of truth come up. Pi does not embrace religion because it is true or a warped human approximation of eternal truth. The contrast between the two stories is not between what is true and what isn’t between what captures the essence of what happened and what doesn’t. No, for Pi the difference is what each story offers. One offers pain and suffering and despair while the other at least offers some beauty, some hope.

Pi goes beyond an intellectual humility that realizes that it could be wrong and therefore keeps from encroaching on God’s authority. Rather, in Pi’s world there seems no ultimate truth; no standard to appeal to regardless of position or background. I for one, fail to see the point of religious belief it is not a valid truth claim; if it doesn’t speak to a reality (a deeper, even non-physical reality but truth nonetheless). Perhaps, I am reading too much into all of this but for me the spiritual moral of the story muddied the work rather than giving it weight.