Life of Pi | Establishing Faith Despite Opposing Realities: The Truth of Fiction in Life of Pi
David Partikian is a freelance writer and a college English instructor. In this essay, Partikian discusses the idea that "unbelievable" tales—tales that defy logic—are an integral part of most religions. In order to have faith and believe in God, or the unknowable, we need to believe in stories that otherwise seem fictional, such as the biblical accounts of the Fall of Man and Jonah and the Whale, or the tales of the Ramayana. Life of Pi is similarly a tale that asks the reader to suspend disbelief and have faith; it is only through this suspension that a person is able to read “a story to make you believe in God.”
At a superficial level, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a simple tale of endurance after a shipwreck. However, there is much more to the novel than that. Ultimately, Martel has created an allegory for something deeper, which sets it apart from more straightforward, journalistic-style survival tales. The added twist of having a 450-pound Bengali tiger in the lifeboat adds an unreal Calvin and Hobbes element; on a literal level, a teenage boy relates to a tiger during a months-long adventure at sea, and from this he somehow learns the necessities of survival.
But to...
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