***WARNING MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD, DON’T CONTINUE IF YOU WANT TO READ THE BOOK WITHOUT KNOWING THE ENDING***
After taking a moment to compose himself, Pi then relates this dry factuality; this other story. Instead of miraculous story with an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger Pi relates a horrifying story of ugly selfishness and despair. In this story four people survive, Pi, his mother, the ships cook and a sailor. The cook is a madman. He kills the sailor, who had a badly broken leg, to use as bait for fish. The cook torments the survivors in every way, eating all of the food and abusing everyone verbally and physically. After catching the cook in an act of cannibalism, Pi’s mom explodes and slaps the cook. Soon the cook kills her too. In the end Pi kills the cook and then “Solitude begins. I turned to God. I survived.”
The men try and digest this story and seek clues to why the ship sank. Pi can’t help them there; he has no idea why the ship sank. Finally, they feel they have the information they need and prepare to leave. Before they leave Pi has one question:
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which story is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?
Both men choose the story with the animals. Pi responds: "Thank you. And so it goes with God."
This ending weakened the power of the book for me. I find it hard to read this story any other way then to assume that the horrific story of murder and cannibalism is the actual story of what physically happened. What the author seems to be saying is that God is a better story. That religion is a tool to see life in a new light. That all things being equal isn’t it better to believe in the mystery and beauty of a wonderful story? Like a great deal of post-modernist thinking there is kernel of truth in this view. People of faith know that a cold materialist view of life fails to explain what it means to be human. It fails to explain art and beauty, love and wisdom, a meaning beyond ourselves. Faith surely encompasses tradition and experiences that can’t be tied down to cold hard facts. But what is missing is truth. Nowhere in the story does the issue of truth come up. Pi does not embrace religion because it is true or a warped human approximation of eternal truth. The contrast between the two stories is not between what is true and what isn’t between what captures the essence of what happened and what doesn’t. No, for Pi the difference is what each story offers. One offers pain and suffering and despair while the other at least offers some beauty, some hope.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Adam B
Don't read any reviews of this book. Don't read the dust jacket.
The cynical have no chance with this book.Read as though you are a child. Love it and it will awe you. Cherish it and it will give you hope.
2 - Truth Teller
Holtsberry's overt desire to see truth spelled out misses the point entirely. Truth lies between the stories not in one or the other.
Both stories make up the whole truth, illustrating life in an age of reason. One story is about hope and spirituality -- at once unbelievable, provocative, and inspiring -- while the other is about brutish realism and rationality. Without the paradox it would mean less.
Richard Parker is alive and well.
3 - Michelle
The books has been released in German, too and I read some reviews. Yet noone till now emphazised the religious aspects as much. Still, I'm curious to read the novel.
4 - guy
as adam b suggests above, this is not a book for grown-ups.
5 - S.E.Toner
I agree with Holtsberry's review. The story was thrilling as long as it was a story of survival on a boat with a tiger. There was nothing in the ending that would have made me "believe in God" if I were an atheist, and nothing that would have strengthened my belief if I were already a believer. Any strengthening of my beliefs would have occurred as Pi went on his own spiritual quest and found ways to weave all those religious beliefs together in one life. I was deeply disappointed when Pi told his "practical" story to the investigators. I agree that the story with the tiger is much more winsome than the story with the cannabalistic cook, but I disagree that one is more interesting than the other. The story with the cook could have been just as interesting, if told in equal detail. For proof, I point to the enduring fascination we have with the Donner Pass history.
Note to Holtsberry: You need to pay a little attention to spelling.
Nature takes its coarse -- should be "course."
There were some early quotes in the novel that peaked my interest -- should be "piqued."
The men demure -- should be "demur."
s.e.t. 5/28/03
6 - simon
Life of Pi is truly a great read!!Read the book and take in the wonders that Martel has to offer us. Life of Pi shows how short life can be and evokes a an unfound spirit inside of the reader.
7 - John John
Whoo, you all suck. Except for that guy directly above me, he's alright. The rest of you- moronic smug jerks. Go home, fatties.
8 - John John
Sorry, I forgot to add this:
"BUUH IM S.E. TONER EAAH GUHH YOU NEED TO PAY A LITTLE ATTENTION TO SPELLING BLOOO I'M S.E. TONER AND I'LL TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU SPELT WRONG TO SHOW EVERYONE THAT I'M A SUPERIOR BLOGGER VREOO I'M S.E TONER"
9 - S.E. Toner
By the way, I have been sniggering at myself since my 5/28 posting: I misspelled "cannibal." Eep! s.e.t. 7/27
10 - jean-francois
Don't miss out on "The Life of Pi'! It's the most original, intelligent and offbeat work of fiction I've read in years!
While the novel begins by purporting to 'make you believe in God,' I think its real function is to rethink what God really means. Contrary to Holstberry's reading, Pi's experience of religion goes beyond the 'mystical' and 'existential' [besides, these are very charged terms in the history of ideas...], because Pi embraces and practices different faiths as equally valid interpretations of divine existence. His openness to seemingly incompatible creeds suggests that any ultimate 'truth' about god must transcend arbitrary theological parameters. The final chapter further problematizes the role of religious truth by staging a confrontation between divine reasoning and contemporary rationality. Is any negociation possible between such opposed versions of 'truth'? In their shift from skepticism to acceptance of Pi's first story, the Japanese investigators have taken the classic "leap of faith" not only with regard to religious doubt, but also with respect to the power of stories, the magic of narrative.
Pi's name, which above reviewers have unfortunately ignored, yields some of the novel's most provocative reflections on spirituality. Pi's birth name is "Piscine", which designates a state-of-the-art Olympic swimming pool that made Father dream: "its water was so clean... you could have made your morning coffee with it". The Piscine Molitor thus provides an ironic counterimage to the nightmarish "cesspool" through which Pi would later float as a castaway. To avoid being teased in secondary school, Pi recreates his identity by shortening his birth name, and afterwards claims that, under his new nickname, "that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge". As the plot unfolds, this analogy could be pursued to compare the corrugated tin-roofed shack to the tiny lifeboat on which Pi and the tiger found refuge. Pi finally reaches land as though he were reborn into a new life as a radically estranged orphan, bereft of his family and his tiger. Like the Piscine Molitor, the ocean represents indeed an "Olympian" sized body of water which, in many cultural traditions, signifies the mother as well as a spiritually purifying force. In this sense, Pi's emergence from the ordeal resembles not just a rebirth but also a baptism that brings him closer to the divine. The beach where he lands is "like the cheek of God, and somewhere two eyes were glittering with pleasure and a mouth was smiling at having me there".
Here, Pi's generic designation of God contrasts, perhaps revealingly, with his earlier, multiple summoning of "Jesus, Vishnu, Mohammed, etc". Is his survival so wonderful, such source of wonder, that the latter, religion-specific denominations make no sense? For doesn't God itself, like the irrational number "pi", represent the infinite, if not infinite wonder, in most all world religions?
11 - Irene
James Woods' review, by far the most stringent and intelligent commentary on Life of Pi, must be considered in any serious look at this book. That is not to say one can't enjoy the open, even insubstantial being, that is Pi; the world would be a better place if we had more Pi-like people! Martel made a valiant attempt to approach big, if not the biggest questions, and I applaud him for his attempt.
12 - Thomas N. Holland
I highly recommend this novel.What ever your beliefs or views,if you like a great story, read the Life of Pi. It is a haunting and thought provoking book.I read it in mid-July,and I still find my thoughts going back to this book on a regular basis.I almost did not buy this novel because of the hype on it about making "you believe in God". I didn't want to read about any metaphysical nonsense.But I had remember reading a good review on it so I bought it.I read this book while on a long distance flight,having enough time to read the main story, but I only glanced through the coda.So I came away with the book's first story but missed the second one.I was very impressed with the book,with how well writen, structured, and imagitive it was...the story of a boy and a tiger on a lifeboat and their mutual surivial is a hell of a story..but there were a few things in the story that puzzled me,including the name of the doomed Japanese ship,The Tsimtsum.( It didn't 'feel' like Japanese to me..it isn't..it is 'must mist' spelled backwards.)So I went back to the book and reread it again, and read the coda as well.The coda of course flips the orginal story on its head,or if you will, back on its feet. At first I was stunned, dismayed and angry at the author for what he did to the story, but then I realized that Martel had taken a good read and suddenly turned it into a great or near great novel.Pi becomes much more of an amazing personality...deeper in deeds,strengths and in faults.As for the complaint about the ending that some may have,one must remember that the real ending of the book is not at the end of the book,but at the end first part of the book.There,the 'author' tells us about Pi's loving wife and happy children and announces that "This story has a happy ending".One of the many theme of this book is of how a lonely and somewhat outcast of a boy survives a horrible experience,adjusts to it and goes into the mainstream of life.
There are currently rumors that Steven Speilberg will be the producer of the movie from this book, and if so,I have no doubt that he will ignore the ending of the book and just tell the story of the boy and the tiger.I gather from the reviews above that many of the readers of this book wished that the author had done the same.But the book is much richer for the addition of the 'real' story.
As for Holtsberry attack on the 'Post Modern' views of Truth,I am always puzzled by those who think that Truth must be smeared with a heavy coat of metaphysics.We live, we die,the earth will one day be scorched to embers by the sun.There is much fuss about the 'relativism' of the modern world,but religion is chocked full of moral relativism.The god of Abraham and Moses is a self-confessed mass murder(the Flood ,Sodom and Gomorrah,Onan,allowing Satan to murder Job's children and there servants in order to prove a point...and I also vaguely remember something about a group of innocent children being murdered by God because of the sins of their parents). So if God is the definition of the good, of truth,yet is a mass murderer( the best defense I have heard is that those he murdered were sinners and as the creator of all, he has the right to murder those whom displease Him,but the arguement then is that with that line of reasoning He has the right to lie to us as well,so that the Bible may be just a joke,and no more the Truth than the Koran or the Book of Mormon,or what ever),then the truth from God is even more bleak and confusing than what we get from the Post Modernists.
I think Yann Martel is using The Life of Pi as a way to trying to understand religion in the context of today's world.After all,who is more guilty of the Holocost,our grandparents and their leaders whom heard rumors of it and did nothing,or God,whom one would expect had a ringside seat to the actually event?If He can strike Onan dead for spilling his seed upon the ground, why did He just watch Hitler,who spilled much worst?In fact I read an interview where Martel said that his next novel will be about a monkey and an ass traviling through WWII Europe,although I have no indication that Martel will expound on the 'silence of God'.Interesting enough,Martel said in this interview that it was in the writing of Pi that he became a believer in God.
But read the book. It is a great story and a deep novel novel. I suspect that generations of English grad students will be writing their dissertations on it. It has very deep subjects going on in it, as well as fun stuff like the name of the ship,the number of days he is at sea is,227,which I think is a prime number.And as of yet no one has asked Martel where he got the name"Richard Parker".Martel was both in the Middle East and in South America,and his first novel is about gender confusion. So is Richard Parker the tiger, named after Richard Parker the scholar and Mid Eastern diplomat,or Richard Parker the sex resarcher who did a study on Brazilian homosexuals and transvitites?Or is it Richard Parker,author of computer books,or Richard Parker,the author of children books including one wrote in the early '60's called "Lion at Large"?
Not as important to the book as the question as to who Pi really is,but fun never the less.So read the book,the writing is superb,the book is one that is easily gotten 'lost into',and Iam sure, will be hell of a lot better than the movie.
13 - cookie monster
It is a fascinating story that relate us to animal in such a way that we would never expect.
The author really puts me in the boat myself and how i must admit that i miss Richard Parker unexpectedly. If I were Pi, I would mourn for a while because my eventually-become-so-dear companion is nowhere off, never heard of..without a proper one last goodbye. This is quite a toucy ending.
The great thing about it is the impact the Richard Parker has on me (and not to mention the meerkats)what with a fearsome beast like a bengal tiger could slowly thaw your feelings. Nevertheless, it contains a motivation. How helpless and hopeless a situation is, you must never give up to try and put the effort. It is confusing here though, the author describe it having an orange coat as illustrated on the book cover, but didn't it mention bengal tiger? And a Bengal is suppose to be black and white.
But the hype of " believing in God " does not make up what it is. I too, almost feeling not to read it just because it is just another normal and common hype. But the summary at the back of the cover really helps a lot. If the novel ever brought to silver screen, I bet many will be dissappointed as it will not describe as greatly as deeply as in the book. Once u r on the ride of Life Of Pi, u never want to stop the journey for a single minute.
This is a book not to be missed. Definitely!!!!!!
14 - NEVIE
I really liked this book, i guess it does make you believe in God, but it would make me more convinced if this story was actually true.It was still awsome even without being true,but its too bad carniverous islands dont exist.I thought that part of the novel was so interesting.What i found hard to believe was that the whole authors note and the tape recording thing was actually part of the novel.
15 - NEVIE
I mean part of the story, not real duh
16 - jack
yeah it's a moderately decent book
17 - Michelle
After I finally read it I can say: I truly hated it. One of the most boring reads ever.
And now you can flame me...
18 - vaness
it makes you think
19 - tara
Im procrastinated to read it because i think it is boreing. I even have to present something about it in about 3 days for an english project at school. I'm not even finished it yet!!!
20 - Irwin
I enjoyed the book and would recommend it - very creative and provocative. I also think that Holtsberry's commentary is dead on. The book provides some great insight into what's wrong with modernism and what's right with postmodernism and how these philosophies affect our view of the universe. But sadly, as is true of most contemporary writing, it fails to display any knowledge of the problems of the postmodern tendency to depart from critical thinking when it comes to the subject of truth and the nature of God.
21 - shon
im feeling realy stupid-but i fail 2 understand- which story is correct? what does he meen whaen he says-"and so
it goes with god"...please help!!
22 - ck
Ok...bear with me here...just finished this facinating novel and like many of you, the end threw me for a bit. However, I think the author might be making an analogy to the writings (teachings, doctrine, etc) of all religions. What makes something "real" is one's ability to "believe" it is real. Let's face it, the stories in the Holy Bible, etc. are unbelievable if you had just heard them told straightforward without any formal backing from the religious institutes that uphold these writings. Some guy who was crucified came back to life...he brought another guy to life earlier...sounds like "a better story" but put it in the context of faith and you have millions of Christians worldwide believing this story without question. Same holds true for all religions...faith makes it true to the one that believes. The Japanese businessmen could not believe the first story because they did not have faith...they needed a more reasonable explanation...Just as agnostics and atheists might look for a "more reasonable explanation" of the events laid out by religious leaders. It is important to note which story was told first..it was only when that story didn't satisfy that Pi offered a second, more horrific scenerio. Remember what is said in Chapt 22, the agnostic, when faced with the true light of God, will still try to explain away the very proof in front of him. Remember, too, that the truth of Pi's story had no baring on the information that the Japanese men sought..how the ship sank. Why did it matter to them so much what happened after the ship had already sunk? Why couldn't they just accept his story at face value...it really had no baring on them...why force him to retell just because they could not accept the first as true. Why didn't they just leave, shaking their head saying that he must have gone mad. Instead they almost insisted on a different version, and then congratulated themselves when the stories had similar elements. We do the same with stories of God..we try to explain it away with science or analysis, and then pat ourselves on the back when we can come up with a reasonable explanation that "fits" with the known facts. This is a story of faith...believing in the tiger (the richer, more subtle, more infinitely sublime story)is a show of faith. Allowing yourself to take the easier (and more psychoanalytical)approach shows a lack of faith...Gee, Pi must have blocked out all of those "bad" memories with this fantastic story...he could use some counciling!
But the story has a happy ending (beginning?) This boy grows up to be happy and well adjusted with his own family...does this mean his story is true? Each reader takes away his own meaning. That is the beauty of this book. Hope you liked my analysis!
23 - Krittika
I finished reading "The Life Of Pi" today and i must say that I felt rather terrible to have ended it. It felt like the entire journey had come to an end and I had to get back to my normal life. I lived with Pi at the zoo, in the vast Pacific, Pi's thoughts, emotions and faith. The only aspect that did not quite convince me was Pi's maturity with respect to his age. At times he was too profound and so he sounded rather fake. Another thing is that how can the boy lead such a normal life after such an unusual journey? He comes across as a regular human being - Should he be like that? Is that the beauty of it? It puzzles me. But on the whole, the idea of faith and the will to survive makes Pi an extraordinary human being - I wish there was someone like him in the world, a person full of faith, optimism and serenity ( if i may call it that ! ). Of course, Richard Parker is my hero! Pi truly survives due to him...
To conclude., all I can say is that the story with the animals is what made it so beautiful and enchanting. ( the story with the humans is a huge contrast). Everybody takes something meaningful from this story, and that is pretty amazing. Its open ended as far far as the thoughts go, but its a story which grips you right till the last page.
A request : if anyone has Yann Martel's address, please send it to me.I will be extremely grateful. Thank you.
24 - Adeel
I need 5 good quatations from this book! that explains the book or the importance of the quatation. if u guys can help i really appereciate it! thanx!
25 - Georgios Tsatsos
Has ever anyone though of the tiger and Pi as two faces of the same person?
After the experience of the life in the ocean the child turned itself from a
vegetarian to a carnivorous and from a teenager to an adult. In his mind he
became a tiger and a teenager simultaneously. This was his self-defence
mechanism that prevented him from insanity. And as soon as he arrived in
Mexico there was no need for the tiger side of his character to be there so
it left. The teenager was transformed as well and evolved to maturity.
As for the island couldn't it be the ocean itself? He is mentioning that he
could leave there for ever since his basic needs were meet. Ok maybe this
part is a bit exaggerated...
There is a talk about religion taking place as well.
Patel mentioned that you can be atheist but not agnostic for too long. An
agnostic and a person that believes in all kind of religions at the same time
is not very far away. In fact is the opposite face of the same thing,
because he does not accept as something to be true or not but considers all
possibilities. Patel asks us to pick a story, otherwise if the reader thinks
that both stories could be possible then he will not be able to enjoy either
at their full extent. This reader will be the equivalent of an agnostic. But
Patel has leaved through both stories (and 3 religions) without rejecting
one. In his mind all different stories are equally enjoyable. The difference
between an agnostic and Patel is that although both consider all different
possibilities, Patel doesn't pick up the weak points of each story or
religion but believes and enjoys each one for whatever it has to offer.