Life of Pi

It has been years since I read this 2001 novel by Yann Martel, but the recent film seemed pretty close to my memory.  The movie left out the part about Pi, as a boy, reading manuals about how to train animals when his father owned a zoo, and I didn’t remember him being married (with children) in the book, but mostly the film fit with what I remembered.

I’ve seen it categorized as magical realism, which certainly fits, but it could also be read as traditional romantic fiction, in which an unreliable narrator tells a fantastic story, which, however incredible, embodies a powerful truth.  Even the alternative, more believable, version of the story qualifies as romance rather than realism, since it is, however credible, an amazing, extra-ordinary, improbable story in its own right. 

What is untraditional is the presentation of both stories, two different versions of the same events, one fantastic, one possible (if not probable) and the choice given to the reader to choose the better version, not only which is the better story but which is more truthful.  From a post-modern perspective, the novel presents the truth as rhetorical, rather than a matter of objective fact.  From a traditional perspective, it presents a modern version of Pascal’s wager, namely, since it is impossible to know objective truth, then bet on the one that is more imaginative and beautiful, however fantastic.  In religious terms, a world with supernatural possibilities is far preferable to a world of bare natural facts.

Another way of reading the two stories is in terms of allegory vs. realism, or internal vs. external.  One story offers an allegorical version of the internal, subjective experience, while the second story offers a “realistic” version of the external, factual experience.  In this case, both stories are equally true, one from a psychological perspective, the other from an empirically observable perspective.

To reverse the order of the stories in the novel, let’s begin with the more believable story.  After a shipwreck, the teenage Pi is trapped on a life boat with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, and the ship’s cook.  The cook kills the sailor to use for fishing bait. When Pi’s mother objects, he threatens her and Pi.  She gets Pi to safety on a raft and is then killed by the cook.  Pi then kills the cook and, alone on the lifeboat, manages to survive until he makes landfall in Mexico.

Keep in mind that, from childhood, Pi has been a religious seeker.  Raised as a Hindu, he also follows Christianity and Islam.  Like a good Hindu, he is a vegetarian.  His father, lost in the shipwreck, was a rational, scientific man, who taught Pi the value of fact and logic.  His mother, on the other hand, believed that science could only tell you about external truth, not the truth of the human heart.  She supported Pi in his religious quest.

At the mercy of the elements and the competition for survival, Pi’s mother holds to her values, berating the cook for killing the sailor and sacrificing herself to save Pi.  Pi, however, puts his own survival first, killing the cook and becoming a carnivorous fish-eater in order to save himself.  When he tells this version of the story, he tearfully acknowledges his guilt and the “evil” within himself that made his survival possible.

In the allegorical version of the story, Pi is trapped on a lifeboat with an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger.  The hyena kills the zebra and orangutan, and the tiger kills the hyena, leaving Pi to match his wits with the tiger’s natural predatory nature in order to survive.  Confronted with the parallels between the two stories, Pi admits that in the second version he is the tiger.  Allegorically, then, in the second version (the fantastical version that takes up the main body of the novel), the tiger represents the predator, the carnivore, and the will to survive within Pi, the religious vegetarian, who seeks to hold the tiger at bay, feeds it, keeps it alive, finally tames it, controls it, and ultimately befriends it.

 In one episode Pi and the tiger land on a mysterious island populated by meerkats for the tiger, vegetation for Pi, and fresh water for both.  At night, however, the island itself becomes carnivorous.  Pi and the meerkats survive by climbing into the trees; the tiger retreats to the lifeboat.  When Pi realizes the underlying predatory nature of the island, he takes the tiger and the lifeboat back out to sea.  This is the part I liked the least when I read the novel.  It seemed extraneous to the rest of the story and a step too far into fantasy, beyond improbable, into impossible.  When I saw the film, though, I realized the allegorical point, namely the duality of nature, which gives life by day, and takes it by night. 

Similarly, the tiger, which threatens Pi’s life, also gives Pi a sense of purpose which aids in his survival.  And Pi himself, the religious vegetarian, harbors within himself the predatory carnivore.  Human nature itself, like the island, is capable of both life-giving power and death-dealing force. Like Pi and his mother, we are capable of moral values and of religious yearning for higher life, and, like Pi and the tiger, we are capable of feeding off of other lives for our own survival.  Pi is able to survive by taming and befriending the tiger, not by denying it.  He imagines the soul of the tiger, the spiritual power behind it.

When they make landfall in Mexico, Pi is deeply disappointed and hurt when the tiger disappears into the jungle without a backward look.  Once in civilization, he can return to his vegetarianism, his moral values, and his religious quest, but not without a sense of loss in the accompanying alienation from his natural self.

Which story do you prefer?  But why choose?  Together they tell the human story in greater depth, breadth, and nuance than either one alone, just as Pi’s father’s scientific world view and his mother’s religious sensibility together offer a more complete vision of truth than either one alone.

In the traditional “coming of age” story, a youth begins in innocence, comes to experience the evil in the world, including the evil within, and then must decide how to come to terms with that discovery.  One can make one’s peace with it and advance into healthy maturity, or one can become stuck in disillusionment, bitterness, and cynicism.  Life of Pi follows that pattern.  Pi can become stuck in the “realistic” version of his story, living out a life of guilt and self-loathing, or he can make peace with his own human nature through imaginative yearning and go on to live out his aspirations for higher life.

There is herein a lesson for all of us:  Know the “evil” within yourself; do not submit to it, but recognize it, respect its power, tame it, control it and befriend it.  Know that you could not survive without it.