Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a book that’s hard to figure out. There are two confusing stories that makes you think twice about the whole story. The first impression of the book is, “Oh. A tiger and a man have to survive on a boat together. So what?” But after you read it, and more you think about it, the more confused readers seem to get about the storyline or plot. Yes, the book is about a man who gets stranded at sea on a boat with some wild animals, but there’s a twist at the end that leaves you wanting to know more. The movie recently came out, also, so people have seen the movie too. But the real question is which story is true?
Yann Martel makes the book seem so unrealistic and so untrue. But towards the end, the main character named Pi reveals another side of the story that makes you think twice about the book. There’s the animal story, which is basically the main story throughout the book. Pi’s family gets on a boat with all the animals at their zoo, and when the ship sinks, Pi gets on a lifeboat. He is soon joined on the lifeboat by a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutang, a nasty hyena, and, of course, a tiger. The majority of the book is about the animals trying to survive each other. The hyena kills the zebra with the broken leg, and then the orangutang eventually gets killed by the hyena too. Out of self-perseverance, or revenge, the tiger kills the hyena until it’s just the tiger and Pi. Pi has to learn to cope with the hungry and confused meat-eater. That's the part that most people find hard to believe.
Pi’s family weren’t very supportive of him because he couldn’t figure out which religion he wanted to follow. His family couldn’t trust him because he thought that more than one religion was easy to follow. His peers always made fun of his name, so Pi proved himself smart by writing the first hundreds of numbers in Pi, starting out with 3.14159, and continuing across multiple chalkboards in the school, impressing his fellow classmates and earning his dignity. In the scenes towards the middle of the book, when he’s on the boat at sea, Pi seems like he is capable of being dominant towards a strong animal such as a tiger. Pi’s past may relate to why he thinks about the story in two different ways, but it’s hard for anyone except the author to think of how. The reader has to decide which story to believe, and in the book, it tells how Pi has to decide which religion to follow. In the end, he follows multiple religions, which is similar to how the book ends: You can either believe one, or both.
In the book, it tells how the tiger got its name. There was a mixup with paperwork, and the two names were switched, so the tiger got the name Richard Parker. The family who owned the zoo thought it was hilarious, so the name stuck. The author used the name because there were multiple men with the name Richard Parker that have either become cannibals or have become cannibals at sea. The author probably chose that name for that reason, because the author tells how the tiger kills the hyena which killed the other two animals on board, so the name Richard Parker is significant to the details of the story.
Even reading the book and seeing the movie, it’s hard to figure out which of the stories that Pi tells is right. You can believe one or the other, which is sort of how Pi followed his religions. Neither of the stories are correct to Pi, and the author writes how Pi doesn’t really know which one is real, but he does know about being on a boat and having some mammals, animals or humans, on the boat with him. Nobody really knows which of the two stories that Pi tells are true, but it’s up to the reader to figure out which one to believe.
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