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Life of Pi, a la Shmoop. Can you imagine how terrified you’d be if
you were trapped on a small boat with a Bengal tiger?
Could you even handle someone that seriously excited about cereal?
Well, Pi had to deal with it.
Or did he? In Life of Pi by Yann Martel…
…an older guy, Pi, tells a story about when he was younger.
Like all of us, his childhood was about the loss of innocence, a journey of self-discovery,
and the ability to convincingly wield a makeshift whip.
He describes in detail how his family attempted to move an entire zoo across the ocean…
…and about the storm and subsequent sinking of the boat…
…which resulted in Pi having to bunk up with a handful of mostly undesirable roomies.
But… did any of it really happen?
Of course it didn’t really happen… it’s a work of fiction.
But within the framework of the story, in Pi’s world at least… was there really
a tiger?
Or was he telling a little white… liger? Our first instinct is to take Pi at his word.
After all, we’ve stuck with him for 350 pages… it would be sorta disappointing to
find out we were being hoodwinked.
And besides, Pi makes a big deal out of us needing to have “faith.”
If we refuse to believe his story… aren’t we totally missing the entire point of it?
And yet… when we press the logic button on our brain… things don’t quite add up.
All signs seem to point to the idea that Pi underwent some truly awful experiences around
the time that the ship went down…
…and that the only way he could reasonably cope with it all was to fabricate a tale that
made everything… much less real.
Besides… the stuff he describes couldn’t really happen.
Training a tiger on the open sea?
A seaweed island chockfull of meerkats?
Either Pi is pulling our leg… or there was something in his water.
But maybe this is one circumstance in which… it’s okay if we don’t know.
Is the author really asking us to decide?
Or is he asking us to appreciate and revel in the uncertainty?
Pi’s religious devotion and love of big, unanswerable questions hints at the idea that
we’re not really supposed to know what happened…
Instead, it’s merely important that we wonder. So what’s going on here?
Fact?
Fiction?
Or… are we talking in circles?
Shmoop amongst yourselves.