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Life of Pi, a la Shmoop. Can you imagine how terrified you’d be if

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you were trapped on a small boat with a Bengal tiger?

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Could you even handle someone that seriously excited about cereal?

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Well, Pi had to deal with it.

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Or did he? In Life of Pi by Yann Martel…

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…an older guy, Pi, tells a story about when he was younger.

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Like all of us, his childhood was about the loss of innocence, a journey of self-discovery,

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and the ability to convincingly wield a makeshift whip.

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He describes in detail how his family attempted to move an entire zoo across the ocean…

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…and about the storm and subsequent sinking of the boat…

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…which resulted in Pi having to bunk up with a handful of mostly undesirable roomies.

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But… did any of it really happen?

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Of course it didn’t really happen… it’s a work of fiction.

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But within the framework of the story, in Pi’s world at least… was there really

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a tiger?

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Or was he telling a little white… liger? Our first instinct is to take Pi at his word.

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After all, we’ve stuck with him for 350 pages… it would be sorta disappointing to

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find out we were being hoodwinked.

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And besides, Pi makes a big deal out of us needing to have “faith.”

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If we refuse to believe his story… aren’t we totally missing the entire point of it?

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And yet… when we press the logic button on our brain… things don’t quite add up.

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All signs seem to point to the idea that Pi underwent some truly awful experiences around

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the time that the ship went down…

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…and that the only way he could reasonably cope with it all was to fabricate a tale that

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made everything… much less real.

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Besides… the stuff he describes couldn’t really happen.

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Training a tiger on the open sea?

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A seaweed island chockfull of meerkats?

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Either Pi is pulling our leg… or there was something in his water.

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But maybe this is one circumstance in which… it’s okay if we don’t know.

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Is the author really asking us to decide?

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Or is he asking us to appreciate and revel in the uncertainty?

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Pi’s religious devotion and love of big, unanswerable questions hints at the idea that

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we’re not really supposed to know what happened…

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Instead, it’s merely important that we wonder. So what’s going on here?

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Fact?

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Fiction?

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Or… are we talking in circles?

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Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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