Life of Pi

In the stories we tell to make people understand our own troubles, no matter how outlandish, there is always a part of the truth to reveal a part of our own identity. In the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi’s seemingly impossible journey makes a part of our human nature more clear to us than ever before. Pi tells two stories, one with a tiger, hyena, and impossible botany, and the other with selfishness, murder, and cannibalism. Both are true and reveal the same truth about human nature; that there is more animal in even the most civilized human than they would ever admit to society or themselves. Seemingly impossible stories give the same amount of truth to our lives as any other modern day miracle like love or life as long as they are told with as much truth and experience as the “yeastless facts” would have been.

Many parallels bind both of Pi’s stories to the same truth. Both begin with the sinking of the Tsimtsum, have murder and suffering in the middle, and end on the shores of Mexico. After he tells the Japanese shipping company men both of his stories, Pi asks, “Which is the better story…?” (317) They tell him that they like the story with the animals and he says, “And so it goes with God” (317). Pi has a predisposition to religion. Religion is made of stories to explain truths in human ways or how things came to be. No one would be very interested in religion if there weren’t a few parts to it in order to give it “That spark that / brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the history or the food is right” (VIII-IX). In Pi’s animal story, the history and the food may be right, but the presence of animals is not. Richard Parker is the animal instinct inside Pi coming out to guide, protect, and prompt him toward his survival. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself saying that he had done all of those horrible things. Saying he was with a tiger that killed and ate people is a lot less damaging than saying he had done it, nevermind that he and the tiger are the same. Pi would never want admit to society or himself that he, a perfectly well-raised, religious, educated, Indian boy had done any of the horrible things in his stories. People make stories with captivating detail in order to protect their reputation and moral balance.

Pi’s bizarre and extreme circumstance and desperation prompt him to act against how he normally would. He isn’t in his usual setting. Instead of in the streets of a civilized culture, he is thrown into a completely foreign situation: stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with his thoughts, sanity, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi has been a devout vegetarian and Hindu all his life, and so when he is pushed by hunger to kill a fish, it causes him to break down in hot tears, weeping “heartily over this poor little deceased soul… I was now a killer” (Martel 183). His entire life, he has been raised around animals, treating them as friends, like humans. To kill an animal is just as bad as killing a human. He is pushed to this extremity in a dire situation and would normally never have done that. It is necessary for civilization to recede in order for Pi to discover what lengths he is willing to go to in order to survive, in fact, in Pi’s second story without animals, he admits that he is drawn so close to starvation that he kills and eats a part of another man. After going through great trouble and using strenuous force he admits that “It was delicious, far better than turtle. I ate his liver. I cut off great pieces of his flesh”