Life of Pi | A Christian Parable

Tamara Fernando is a freelance writer based in Seattle, Washington. In this essay she argues that Life of Pi can be read on one level as a Christian parable. The suffering and ultimate spiritual resurrection that Pi experiences parallel the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and at the end of the novel, similar to Jesus, Pi offers his own parables about the meaning of faith.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, the novel’s protagonist, Piscine Molitor, relates an anecdote of how he came to be known by his nickname, Pi. When he first entered elementary school, a schoolmate immediately began calling him “Pissing,” a denigrating name that stuck with him throughout primary school, much to Pi’s great humiliation. When he reached secondary school, however, he resolved to overcome this problem: insisting on being called Pi, he drew the Greek symbol for pi on the blackboard of his classroom for his teachers and classmates to see, and from that point...

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