Life of Pi

Intrinsically related to the theme of blurring reality and fantasy is Pi’s penchant for storytelling. Life of Pi consists of several layers of stories upon which readers are supposed to approximate some level of factuality. Pi is not a manipulator or liar, but he simply recognizes different categories of factual value: rational, emotional, spiritual, botanical, et cetera. He repeatedly challenges other people’s notions of “reasonable” to make the point that belief in anything requires some level of conjecture. Pi’s journal contains two dates: July 2, 1977 and February 14, 1978, which mark the beginning and end of his journey.

Pi’s philosophical musings, such as his rumination on the multitudes of skies, mirrors this nonlinear schema of time. Noting “many skies” and “many seas” that he finds “shattering to the senses,” Pi sees himself “perpetually in the centre of a circle” (215). While the details of his environment change, the “geometry” doesn’t. Even worse, Pi starts sensing that “the circles multiply” (216). As he says, “to be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles” (216). Pi’s story is powerful precisely because each version contains different truths. As his pantheistic beliefs hold, there is multiplicity within oneness.

Pi is not the only character who values embellishment. In the “Author’s Note,” the fictitious author writes that “for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?” (viii). And so begins the story that will make him believe in God. That Francis Adirubasamy’s story is not about the Roman Empire or seventh-century Muslim evangelists in Arabia, as the author expects, and instead about a zookeeper’s son from Pondicherry is significant. The setting mirrors what Pi calls “epic simplicity” (9), or the profundity of insight found in the minutiae of life or small, everyday ritual. Storytelling, which in Pi’s case involves an element of “forgetting,” is his means of survival.

Whatever of its plot details, Life of Pi is fundamentally a story of astonishing survival and will to live. The tone of Pi’s narration shifts abruptly from introspective to stressful and chaotic with the sinking of the Tsimtsum. In many ways, the sinking of the Tsimtsum symbolizes the state of pre-creation. It is a scene of chaos and anarchy. Throughout Life of Pi, Pi conceives of religion as something that provides an essential patterning and order to anarchic existence. For instance, he is particularly comforted by the ordered nature of Muslim prayer ritual, just as he is relaxed by the hypnosis induced by swimming. Both of these entail repetition and intense focus that, for Pi, induce a state of ecstasy. Pi is constantly trying to find ways to survive chaos. Even atheists, owing to their sense of conviction, are capable of a “deathbed leap of faith” in final recognition of God’s Love (64). This capacity to believe constitutes an intertwining between belief and survival. On the other hand, agnostics, being severely doubt-ridden, are ill-equipped to survive. Pi imagines a complete malfunctioning of agnostics in the face of the Divine: “possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain” (64). Survival likewise requires the proverbial leap of faith.

In his zoological musings, Pi explains how animals are also wired for social survival. His systemization of alpha, beta, and omega animals reflect a recognition of how animals navigate social hierarchies. On “escape-prone” wild animals, Pi says they are “too set in their ways to reconstruct their subjective worlds” (40). Fundamentally, animals crave predictability, hence the absurdity of the notion that zoos restrict animal freedom. Furthermore, Pi opines that “All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt” (41). Therefore, there is a madness that is essential to survival. Whether that madness entails a belief in the implausible or some other “sane or insane” action (41), salvation and survival resides in flexibility, not rigidity.