Life of Pi

            At face value, the most novel aspect of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is how seriously it considers the religious yearnings and questions of a child. Pi Patel is a young boy (I guess we’d consider him a teenager), but the novel never trivializes his search for answers or reduces it to childlike wondering. Rather, the book treats his relative innocence as a virtue when he seeks to find a true church. I’m reminded of a conversation I had in a documentary class, after we viewed a piece of church missionary propaganda from the 1980s named Called to Serve. The movie was pretty sentimental and imbalanced in its discussion of religion, but what else is expected from a primary source? A fellow student mentioned that church videos ought to be sentimental and heavy-handed, because they’re meant to “string kids along until they can find a testimony of their own.”

            That notion troubles me in a profound way. First, I think that children are completely able to rationalize belief and find understanding – our church even agrees, in considering the age of accountability eight years old. Regardless of whether that’s exactly the right age for a child to make lifelong commitments, it seems prudent to assume that children are capable of great understanding. That’s maybe the primary, number one thing we’ve learned this semester, but it seems like Life of Pi is the rare text about religion that takes this idea seriously.

Pi is also a story that rejects dogma in its ideas of religious truth. In that sense, it is a far more spiritual text than a religious one. It values the traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity on an equal level. There is not a single truth, but rather many relative truths that give humans access to some kind of ultimate power. The means by which we access that higher truth matters significantly less than our willingness to accept it. Life of Pi’s idea of spirituality sort of rests upon Pascal’s Wager, implying that faith alone is worth as much as knowledge.

That premise is tested in the final pages of the novel, when Pi tells the Japanese officials the alternative to his animal story – the one full of human tragedy and nightmare stuff. When the officials say that they prefer the story with the tiger and zebra and orangutan, Pi’s line “And so it goes with God” wraps the entire universe up with a bow.

(sidenote: for all the cool things about Ang Lee’s movie adaptation, his Pi totally blows this moment. The character in the film never seems sincere in his explanation of the two stories. It almost plays as “come on, please believe the animal one, it’s nicer” rather than an actual test of faith).

Much like Babe: Pig in the City’s assumptions about the world and people, Life of Pi doesn’t operate in the realm of right and wrong dictated by doctrine and ancient dogma. Rather, the two advocate for decency, morality, and charity, all without pretense. Both acknowledge the existence of a god in their stories, but both put faith in people to rise up and meet the expectations of that higher power. In the eyes of a child, words like historicity and proof don’t mean nearly anything – these stories teach us that the true value lies in belief; in faith.