Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Life of Pi

Religion and Truth in Life of Pi

Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a very fanciful novel with very real commentary about the human condition and the nature of spiritual understanding. The main plot begins when Piscine Patel, a sixteen-year-old Indian boy and the son of a zookeeper who goes by the nickname Pi, is relocating along with his family and many of their animals to Canada. After a shipwreck, Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with some of his family's animals. The one that gives Pi the most cause for concern -- and the one that survives the longest -- is the Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The very strange and highly dangerous situation Pi finds himself in as a shipwreck survivor along with a carnivorous and territorial animal, as well as other details of his life, provide a large impetus fr reflection, and in fact the most important portions of the book actually deal with Pi's thoughts on life, reality, and religion. Ultimately, the lesson of Life of Pi as it is revealed to the title character and to the reader is that there is no one path to truth, but rather that every individual life has its own truth stemming from its own identity and experience.

There are many ways, both implicit and explicit, that this lesson is illustrated throughout the novel. The most clear way in which this occurs is in Pi's experiments with religions other than the Hinduism with which he was raised. His own personal assessment of his faith in the book reflects the larger message of a search for truth, just as his journey across the sea could be read as symbolic as a personal journey of discovery. This only shows the relationship between religion and the search for truth in Life of Pi on a very broad level, however. Martel goes much deeper than this in the book, and as Pi mentally explores each religion it can be seen to be clearly linked to certain occurrences in the novel and Pi's concept of how to interact with the world as his experiences continue to shape his identity and sense of truth.

Pi's thoughts about Christianity are especially illuminating in this regard; the differences that sound out the most to him between the Christian religion (which it can be presumed is the most well-known and understood religion of Martel's readers) and his own Hinduism are very telling when it comes to Pi's character and way of seeing the world. He notes that "Christianity is a religion in a rush. Look at the world created in seven days. Even on a symbolic level, that's creation in a frenzy," whereas he refers implicitly to Hinduism by mentioning "a religion where the battle for an ingle soul can be a relay race run over centuries" (Martel 57). Pi's situation on the lifeboat is sort of an odd mixture of a heightened need for action -- a sort of rushing sensation -- and the long patience required of a battle of wills. It is a mixture of the Hindu and Christian ideals as Pi sees them, and he incorporates both worldviews.

For Pi, one belief system is not enough. Everything that is kept separate or alone is necessarily incomplete. It is very important to him that one has beliefs and faith, both of which Pi understood to require imagination. He shows this in his disdain of agnostics, seeing their inability to imagine whether there is or isn't a God or gods as a failing, and a basic lack of identity. He makes this even more explicit when he recounts how his immersion in the Hindu religion began in his infancy, and states that "religion is more than rite and ritual. There is what the rite and ritual stand for" (Martel 48). For him, what they stand for is a way of thinking and viewing the world that does not exclude other viewpoints, but that patiently imagines life from many angles. During his trip in the lifeboat, it is this ability to see things from another's perspective that allows him to reach an understanding with Richard Parker and survive.

It is Pi's ability to see multiple truths from widely varied perspectives that enables him not only to survive, but to lead the successful and spiritually fulfilling life it is very evident he has. In many ways, he learned this from growing up as the son of a zookeeper and working with the many animals. His father lists the many dangers of the various animals, which teaches Pi to respect them, but he comes to an even greater understanding of them as well. This can also be seen as a mixture of Christian and Hindu influences. It is more of a Hindu concept to believe that animals are equivalent -- at least largely -- to people. His Hindu father, however, instills only fear in Pi about the animals dangers. The Christian concepts of compassion and of a hidden purpose for even the most seemingly useless, dangerous, and/or disgusting creatures. Pi shows his transition towards this type of thinking and away from the pure negativity of his father in his early comments about suffering: