The Better Story - Life of Pi 3

Life and death are ugly things. Yes, there are good things to life, and maybe, if you’re willing to take this step, good things to death. There are rays of sunshine in an otherwise depressingly dark cavern of our world. There are also bad things to life. Annie Dillard pointed out one of them in Tinker Creek when she wrote, “Fecundity is an ugly word for an ugly subject,” (Tinker Creek, Course Anthology, 26). Not only are they ugly, but life and death are also terribly plain, simple subjects. Conception, birth, life, death - that’s all there is. And the only part we even remember of that sequence is – if we’re lucky – the living part. It’s really quite a rip-off.

We sugarcoat these facts with all kinds of things. We occupy our time with adventures, problems, love, questions, goals – these, abstract or concrete, are the butter cream frosting and chocolate chips on top of our otherwise worthless gingerbread house of life. I always knew this, though I didn’t like thinking about it very much, so I didn’t. But in finishing Life of Pi and in reading Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek, I feel that I have to address what I have always known.

When I read the end of this incredibly realistic novel, only to discover that Pi had likely made up most of the story, fashioned its fantastical edges around a bleak and horrifying reality that consisted not of animals but of humans. Of course, it could be that Pi was telling the truth about the story we have been hooked on for over 300 pages, but that seems unlikely. What seems true to me after finishing the novel is this: faced with a reality too painful, too disturbing, and too simple for Pi to deign his own, he decided to add embellishment to the story of his life at sea to make the memory more bearable for him. “Here’s another story,” (Life of Pi, 381) Pi says (in a grave tone, I would imagine), and launches into a horror that involves Pi’s mother being angry with him to the point where he says, “her eyes were [brimming with tears]. […] she didn’t look at me,” (Life of Pi, 386) and also includes Pi having to, “hold [his] mother’s head in [his] hands,” (390). I certainly could not live with memories like that. I would do exactly what Pi did – I would make up an entirely new, more benign, even at times pleasant memory in my mind and tell it to myself over and over again until I actually found myself believing it. (Without embellishment, this text would look...boring and, dare I say, pointless. image courtesy of:http://www.embellish-bi.com/embellish%20logo4.gif).

Did Life of Pi make me believe in God? Well, I always have believed in God so, no, Life of Pi did not do that for me. After reading it, I still believe in God, so that hasn’t changed either. But my idea of the conception of that belief I hold, that has changed. I believe that God is real, that he exists. But, like Katherine said in her blog, “I don’t really like talking about faith and religion because everyone has those sneaking and uncomfortable suspicions that they’d rather not think about” (Katherine’s Blog, “Faith”). There is always that tiny bit of doubt in my mind about whether the fantastical Bible stories I read are fully true, or if they are embellished a bit. About whether the “purpose” I believe I was put on this earth for is God’s or my own invention of something to help me pass my days quicker. What Pi did – adding embellishments to his real story – that is what I believe we do with religion. The bare bones of it are true, I think, of who God is and what he is capable of. But we embellish our otherwise depressing reality of life with words like faith, fate, and destiny. With those words, which for me fall under the umbrella of religion and faith in God, we make ourselves believe that we were placed on earth for that aformentioned purpose, that there is more than the bare, unglamorous life that Annie Dillon so despised in the form of fecundity. That lead me to further questions, the answers to which I definitely do not know. “We are all going to die,” Dillard writes bluntly (Tinker Creek, Course Anthology, 161). So what happens then? Is heaven real? Or is it something we, like Pi, have created in our minds to ease the terrifying fear that Dillard’s statement releases in all of us? (Is there a heaven? Does it look anything like this? Is it all just something we have made up to make ourselves feel better about the unknown? image courtesy of:http://are-you-going.com/images/heaven2.jpg).

In conclusion, though I was disappointed in what I believe to be Pi’s deception of himself and the detectives who interview him regarding his seven months at sea, I feel that I cannot look down on him because in doing so I would be a hypocrite. We all do the same thing in our lives, from the day-to-day to the big questions about why we are all here, on this earth, right now. Mr. Okamoto tells Pi, after he has regaled them with both tales of his journey at sea, that “the story with the animals is the better story,” and Pi responds, “And so it goes with God,” (Life of Pi, 399). I could not agree more. Personally, I’ll take the embellished story about a life at sea with a friendly Tiger over the reality any day. That’s the better story, after all.

(I talked about ideas of fate and destiny in this discussion board entry. This scene, from LOST (I mean come on, you know I had to put something like this in!), shows John Locke - a man with a really, really depressing life for many reasons including abandonment by his parents, conned into giving his deadbeat father a kidney, paralyzation due to his father pushing him out of a window, the list is endless. Yet, he believes that he has a purpose in life, that he was put in Australia to go on a "walkabout" because it is his destiny. Is it actually his destiny? Or is Locke doing the same thing as Pi? video courtesy of:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nosaiIhyuj0)