Though just six pages long, the Author’s Note clues us into the book’s origins even as it blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. The note claims the text is nonfiction, placing this book squarely in the tradition of picaresque novels like Don Quixote, which masquerade as fact even though they are obviously works of imagination. In picaresque novels, the harsh realities of life—poverty, illness, and so on—are subject to wry, ironic, and even humorous treatment. In Life of Pi, Martel uses his narrator to make serious commentary on everything from religion to politics, and the mock-journalistic introduction emphasizes the intersection of fact and fiction in his literary world.
The Author’s Note blends facts and fictions about Yann Martel’s own inspiration for the book to illustrate the central theme of the book: storytelling. Martel really had written two not-so-successful books before this one and inspiration had struck him during a visit to India. But did he really meet Francis Adirubasamy in a coffee shop, and does Pi Patel really exist? The answer is no. On one level, Martel is just doing what fiction writers do: creating an imaginary scenario to delight and entice his readers. But on another level, these opening six pages deftly lay the foundation for the novel’s central theme, which is that storytelling is a way to get around telling the boring or upsetting or uninteresting truth. Martel doesn’t want to say that this novel was created by painstakingly researching zoos and religions and oceanic survival guides, getting up early every morning, and writing for several hours a day. Such an explanation would poke a hole in the balloon of fantasy that Pi’s account inflates over the course of the next three hundred pages; so, instead, he invents a different origin story.
The Author’s Note is balanced structurally by Part Three, another short section that is also concerned with creating the impression that this entire book is a work of nonfiction. These bookends do not really fool the reader, of course, but they give us the ability to suspend our disbelief and invest ourselves more fully in the story we are about to read.
At this early point in Martel’s novel, we have seen hints that Pi has endured something devastating and extraordinary, but we don’t know exactly what. The book approaches that nameless event from the outside in, providing information about Pi’s life before and after before getting to the heart of the tragedy itself. This technique builds up the suspense and allows us to get to know Pi as a normal boy and a fully fleshed out character, not just as a victim of circumstance. It also draws us firmly into the story: we want to know who Richard Parker is and what happened to him, and we wonder about Pi’s memories of India. Though given only a brief mention, Pi’s reference of his thesis on sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria’s cosmogony theory is very important to the book as a whole. In essence, Luria’s theory of creation states that God contracted to make room for the universe. This contraction, called Tsimstum, was followed by light, carried in five vessels. The vessels shattered, causing the sparks of light to sink into matter. God reordered them into five figures, which became the dimensions of our created reality. This seemingly unimportant detail actually foreshadows the main event to come: the sinking of the ship, the Tsimtsum, which gives Pi the room to create his own version of the events that follow. Interestingly, like the five figures that make up reality for Luria, five characters on the lifeboat (including Pi himself) shape Pi’s story.
The zoo occupies an important place in Pi’s memory. Indeed, growing up in a zoo shaped his belief system, taught him about animal nature, and imbued in him many significant lessons about the meaning of freedom. Zoos are places of habit: there are chores that the keepers must perform every day, such as feeding and cleaning the animals and their cages, as well as animal rituals. Pi establishes early on the orderliness of the zoo and the comforting sense of regularity it gives him. Animals prefer the consistency of zoo life just as humans accustom themselves to the rituals and abundance of modern society, their own sort of zoo. Zoo animals rarely run away, even if given the opportunity, and they enjoy the abundant water and food. In the wild, by contrast, life is a constant battle for survival, a race against the odds and other creatures. Death is a constant presence and possibility. All of us living in modern society are essentially zoo creatures, defanged and protected from the wilderness waiting for us beyond the enclosure walls, walls from which Pi will soon be freed.
Explanations of Pi’s name take up nearly as much text as his philosophizing about zoos. The watery associations of Piscine Molitor’s full name are undeniable: piscine not only means “pool” in French but shares a derivation with pisces, or fish. As befits his name, Pi learns how to swim from Francis Adirubasamy, and he gravitates toward water. His full name performs two related and yet antithetical functions in the text: first, it emphasizes the idea that a very strong swimmer like Pi might realistically have survived in the ocean after a shipwreck; and second, it is such an odd name that is has the ring of allegory, positioning Pi as a mythic or fabled character. The literal, mathematic symbol pi, an almost impossibly long number whose combinations never repeat, also symbolizes Pi’s long journey, with all its variations.
Given the amount of energy that Pi devotes to the ideas of rituals and routine in the lives of zoo creatures, it is telling that he uses repetition to train his schoolmates and teachers into calling him Pi. One day at school, he leaps up during roll call and writes his full name on the blackboard; then he underlines his preferred nickname, Pi, and speaks it aloud. He carries out this act in each classroom, during every roll call, to the point where his fellow students start to follow along. For humans as well as animals, repetition proves to be a very effective teacher.
From the animalistic rites and rituals of the earlier zoo section of the novel, the novel has transitioned into a section about religious rites and rituals. In these chapters we witness, through Pi’s eyes, many examples of pious routine, from Christian church-going to Muslim prayer and chanting. We also see the objects that lend comfort to the faithful on a daily basis: paintings of religious figures, like Christ on the cross or of Lord Ganesha, and devotional articles such as sticks of incense and a copper spoon. A central message of the book is becoming clearer and clearer: religion is a method humans have developed of making their lives more pleasurable, more meaningful, and more understandable. But lest the reader interpret Pi’s focus on rites and objects as merely superficial, Pi lets us know that he understands there is more to faith than ritual. He is well aware that without something bigger and more significant, a religious custom is a hollow act. He says as much when he calls the miracles of Jesus Christ “minor magic, on the order of card tricks,” and Muslim prayer “hot-weather yoga for the Bedouins.” These slights come before he has gained a true understanding of and appreciation for the heart and soul of each religious faith, and once he embraces the essence of each religion, he embraces their rituals with enthusiasm as well.
As is made abundantly apparent throughout the text, both Martel and Pi are fascinated in particular by the intersection of zoology and religion. Pi studies both subjects at college, and chapters on zoology are interspersed throughout Part One with chapters on religion and philosophy. Pi makes multiple references to the ways in which zoos are like religion—both are in people’s bad graces these days, he says at one point, because of prevailing notions about freedom. In other words, people sometimes resist what they perceive as constraints on their liberty. Religion, with its many dictates and rules, may be seen as intrusions on personal freedoms. But Pi defends religion the same way he defends zoos earlier in the book, by examining the very definition of freedom and imagining what life would be like without religion. Life inside the walls, as it were, is cozy and comfortable, and people prefer not to leave; life outside is bleak by comparison.
Tucked between these chapters on Hindu, Christianity, and Islam and the earlier chapter on the atheist Mr. Kumar, of whom Pi is extremely fond, falls the section on the ferocity of tigers and the intense territoriality of animals. The placement of this chapter might seem odd, but in fact it is very relevant to its neighboring scenes. Pi’s father allows a tiger to attack a goat in front of his two sons to teach them to never get too close to the tiger cage. Wild animals, even if they’ve been domesticated and trained, are still wild animals at heart. Their intrinsic nature is deep-seated and always ready to boil up to the surface.
The dramatic violence of the tiger-and-goat chapter leads naturally to Pi’s declaration that he once believed that Christianity was about great violence, and Islam about even greater violence. Martel establishes a vague and yet undeniable connection here between the feral acts of wild creatures and the sadistic brutality that humans have inflicted upon other humans for centuries, often because of religious conflicts. Pi soon comes to see that Christianity and Islam are, in fact, about love rather than hatred or violence. But he remains puzzled by certain religious tenets that seem to go against the foundation of love, such as God’s decree that Christ be punished for man’s sins. Pi senses this ominous and mysterious aspect of religion even as he embraces God in all his guises.
This section begins with two of the most important phrases in the entire text: “dry, yeastless factuality” and “the better story.” Both come to the author directly from Pi, and their significance is underscored by the fact that they are repeated within two pages. The two phrases are opposite poles on the spectrum of storytelling. At one end is boring reality, which is as flat as unrisen bread. At the other end is a version of reality that has been enlivened by imagination, improving the story—it becomes a full, hearty, risen loaf of bread, so to speak. When the options are presented in these terms, it is easy to see which is the more tempting. The risen bread is far more appetizing, while the flattened, yeastless option looks about as appealing to eat as cardboard.
The compulsion to invent a better story, to improve one’s reality and make it more livable, is such a deep-seated and natural instinct, Pi says, that even animals do it, whether unconsciously or not. For example, a lion doesn’t think a human is really a lion. But given the right conditions and the appropriate circumstance, a lion may become willing to accept the human as one of its own. Faced either with life as an orphan or life with a foster mother, what lion cub wouldn’t accept a dog as a maternal figure? The fiction improves his life immeasurably.
Pi strongly recognizes the saving grace of a myth or story to enrich “yeastless” factuality, and he knows that believing in a story requires a leap of faith. This is precisely why he is so perturbed by the idea of agnosticism, which in this section comes up for the second time in the novel. Agnostics, as Pi explains it, are rational to a fault. They do not trust anything that they cannot see, taste, or experience. They are wedded to factuality—indeed, they prefer it—and that is the main reason why Pi feels such a strong distaste for them. They are completely unwilling to take an imaginative leap, in either direction.
Pi’s inclination toward spicy, robust cooking is a strong metaphor for his storytelling abilities. The dichotomy between yeastless, dry bread and fluffy, enriched bread is amplified by the fact that, as the author tells us, Pi is a good cook, one who uses abundant spices—so much so that the author sweats and even has digestive trouble when he eats Pi’s food. Pi also seems to take great pleasure in adding condiments (relishes, chutneys, and so on) to the table. Pi’s story, which we are about to get to in Part Two, is one in which he has added yeast, spices, herbs, and anything else he can to make it palatable; apparently the facts alone would be hard to swallow. That additive quality—of heaping layers on layers, spices on spices—also helps explain why Pi practices multiple religions simultaneously. As we see during the confrontation with the priest, pandit, and imam, normal born-and-raised Hindus do not adopt two additional faiths. However, something in Pi drives him to need more stories, more versions of reality, more options. Each faith brings with it its own unique myths and fables, its own assortment of rituals and customs, and its own take on God. Pi explains that the essence of every religion is love, and by practicing multiple religions at once he is able to surround himself in layers of affection, acceptance, understanding, and affirmation. The similarities between Pi and Robinson Crusoe, which the Pi’s mother gives him in this section, are also striking. Like Pi, Crusoe is shipwrecked. Both characters keep journals of their daily activities, develop survival skills, and train animals. As time goes on, both fall ill and hallucinate and encounter cannibals on an island. However, though the activities of both men are quite similar, the differences in their characters are great. Whereas Crusoe seems incapable of deep feelings, Pi embraces them, ricocheting from the deepest levels of sorrow at the loss of his family and his difficult situation to great heights of joy at the thoughts of rescue, food, and God. Though Pi tries to train his classmates to pronounce his name correctly, his dominance extends primarily over Richard Parker. Crusoe takes this mastery one step further and enters into a master-slave relationship with Friday, a victim of the cannibals whom he rescues. Pi is ultimately the more appealing protagonist, a product of modern times, connected to and caring about the world and others in a way that Crusoe never does.
Perhaps the strongest message of this section is the fierce, unrelenting power with which life will fight to stave off death. Again and again in the aftermath of the ship’s sinking, we bear witness to close calls and near-fatal incidents, and yet life continually surprises us with its might and will power. Pi survives his forty-foot fall through the air and lands unharmed on the lifeboat’s spongy tarpaulin cover. The zebra survives a much less graceful fall and a broken leg. Richard Parker, in a state of shock and panic, swims through turbulent ocean waters to clamber aboard a lifeboat. And Orange Juice, having somehow evaded the ocean’s gravity and the suction of the sinking ship, magically appears out of nowhere to join this group of survivors. In retrospect, Pi says, “Had I considered my prospects in light of reason, I surely would have given up and let go of the oar, hoping that I might drown before being eaten.” But the sheer will to live outweighs logical thought, and so he clings to the oar, and to life. This vitality is drawn in stark contrast to the loss of lives—both human and animal—that the Tsimtsum’s sinking caused. The appearance of Orange Juice is particularly moving, since she is the most humanlike of all the creatures that manage to board the lifeboat; her presence emphasizes the loss of human life. Moreover, she is a maternal figure. Pi tells us that she gave birth to two boys at the Pondicherry Zoo, and the parallel between Orange Juice and Mrs. Patel (who also has two sons, Pi and Ravi) is striking.
Taken another way, Pi’s untenable position could be interpreted as the turning point in an adolescent boy’s life, when he must navigate the rough waters between the security of family life and the independence of adulthood. Certainly there is a great deal of material in Part One about the difficulty of growing up, the teasing from childhood friends, and the existential questioning of early adolescence. Just before the sinking of the Tsimtsum, Pi hesitates and then walks past his parents’ cabin door, a hint at his desire to become independent. But the loss of his family leaves him inconsolable and unsure of what to do. However, life goes on, with muscle aches to match emotional pain, and he must figure out how to fend for himself in a lonely, confusing, and even violent world.
Pi’s true education in nature’s savagery begins in this gruesome section. In Part One, Mr. Patel teaches Ravi and Pi about animal nature and its violent tendencies, but it is not until he finds himself in a lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, orangutan, and tiger that Pi truly understands the vicious behavior of wild animals in close quarters. Somewhat naïve, Pi is stunned by much of what he sees—for example, when the hyena eats the zebra’s leg and when the gentle orangutan acts out violently to protect herself from the hyena. The brutality of the animals teaches Pi another lesson: the qualities a human or animal exhibit when unprovoked can vary radically from those that same human or animal will show if attacked or threatened. He is astonished when Orange Juice, a maternal creature that grew up at the Pondicherry Zoo, strikes the hyena with a powerful blow. Pi has never before seen her make any outward displays of aggression; he had assumed her nature was sweet and her disposition even and benevolent. The strike Orange Juice gives the hyena is like a slap in the face to Pi: suddenly he realizes that personality is something separate and distinct from instinct.
Equally surprising to Pi is the fact that life continues in the face of unimaginable pain. The clearest and most obvious example of this is the poor zebra, whose slow death takes place over the course of days. To live in such physical misery is horrifying to Pi. To the reader, however, Pi himself stands as a clear example of heroic endurance. Pi’s body is unharmed, but his emotional and spiritual anguish is intense. He says that his second night in the lifeboat was one of the worst of his life. Yet, in the face of great mental anguish, he endures.
Alone and grief stricken without his family or any other human survivors, Pi finds both solace and sadness in the presence of Orange Juice. He notes that Orange Juice seems to be having some very human reactions to her predicament: she looks queasy and seasick, holding herself up at the edge of the lifeboat like a nauseated person might. More significantly, she looks out at the open water in a way that Pi instantly recognizes as both hopeful (awaiting the appearance of her two sons) and hopeless (not really expected them to appear after all). Though comforted by Orange Juice’s humanlike demeanor, Pi is also saddened by their common bond—their loss of family.
Fear takes numerous forms in the text, but its very omnipresence eventually reduces its power over Pi. As a narrator, Pi is terribly self-aware, and he recognizes and even catalogs some of the gradations of anxiety he feels from minute to minute: the blind terror he feels when he jumps into the ocean only to see a shark fin slice through the water; the defensive panic that comes from facing down a carnivorous, hungry hyena; his dread over his family’s fate. Pi’s enormous and all-encompassing fear of Richard Parker has an odd expression: it makes him feel a little better. With Richard Parker aboard the boat, death is inevitable, not just a possibility. Because of this fact, Pi can stop worrying about what might happen; he can instead be comforted by knowing what will happen, regardless of how horrible that fate is. Accepting his own death makes his fear less paralyzing and enables him to take action. Pi’s fear is tempered somewhat by Richard Parker’s unexpected and welcome snort of prusten, a tiger’s way of stating that his intentions are benevolent. Rather than demonstrating his pure animalistic brute strength, Richard Parker does a quasi-human thing: he indicates a willingness to negotiate. This occurrence more than any other equips Pi with the courage to begin training the tiger. While Pi’s early inclination is to run as far away from Richard Parker as he can—as far as the lifeline between the lifeboat and raft will allow—the tiger’s affable snort brings him back. He begins to reconsider boarding the lifeboat and not confining himself to his raft. This movement of Pi and Richard Parker toward one another, the literal lessening of physical distance, underscores a message that Martel will amplify over the course of the novel: animals and humans aren’t such different creatures after all. Earlier in the novel Pi says that omega animals (such as Richard Parker) will often be obedient to a human trainer in an effort to climb up the social hierarchy, tolerating what they perceive as the human alpha creature’s odd demands. In essence, they mimic human behavior in the same way that Pi, out of respect for Richard Parker, mimics the tiger. It is significant, too, that the tiger bears a man’s name, while Pi could be a shortened form of the word pisces, or fish. Martel has built zoomorphic ambiguity right into their names, pointing out quite strongly the gray area between humanity and animal nature.
Although manmade tools make survival easier, Pi remains reliant on nature. The survival items Pi finds in the lifeboat, in particular the solar stills, help Pi quench his thirst, though he still struggles in feeding himself and Richard Parker. Pi’s first attempt at fishing is a decided failure; the rudimentary hook and bait he puts together don’t quite do the trick. A fluke of nature—the sudden appearance of a school of flying fish—results in his first catch. The juxtaposition of the solar stills and the fish that literally jump right into Pi’s lifeboat seems to be Martel’s way of saying that man cannot completely separate himself from and be independent of nature.
Martel begins to lower Pi’s humanity a notch, bringing him closer and closer to an animal’s existence. Pi’s behavior starts to mimic Richard Parker’s: he uses his urine to delineate his territory and acts furtive and stealthy. Imitation is a method of self-preservation: adapting to the behavior of his wild companion keeps him relatively safe. But even as Pi descends bit by bit into his innate feralness, his humanity resists. He considers drinking his urine (as the hyena would have done) but does not, and he hesitates before killing the flying fish—certainly a different response from Richard Parker’s. The strict demarcation between human civility and animal behavior blurs under these circumstances, but it is not completely lost. The repetition of activities necessary for life proves distressing for Pi. Biology dictates that animals (humans included) perform the same few essential acts again and again: eating, drinking, urinating, defecating, sleeping, and so on. In ordinary life, such repetition can be comforting. But in the context of a lifeboat in the Pacific, where food and water and everything else are scarce and normalcy has gone out the window, repetition is a curse, a threat. Because there is no regular source of water, the compulsion to drink water every day is a nuisance. Because Pi must wear the same clothes every day, they disintegrate and fall off his body. The regularity of events on the lifeboat is reminiscent of the habits of animals in the wild or in a zoo, which Pi has remarked on at length earlier in the book. Indeed, the lifeboat itself becomes a sort of zoo enclosure, and the tethered raft serves as a cage, protecting zookeeper from wild creature. Pi feeds Richard Parker just the way a zookeeper would, cleaning up after him in a similar fashion. The entire setup is familiar—clearly, Pi has learned well from his father. Pi follows in Mr. Patel’s footsteps, letting reason and faith in himself to serve as his guides.
New activities lighten the monotony of Pi’s daily life, though they are quickly absorbed into routine. Each “first” in the lifeboat or on the raft is treated in the account with detail and great passion. However, and inevitably, those firsts quickly meld into a monotonous series of repetitions that dull the senses. The first time Pi kills a fish, we are held in thrall as he hesitates and frets over the act. But as soon as it is over, it is as though a spell has broken: Pi is now free to kill as many fish as he can, any way he can, without any sort of guilt. Unlike a wild animal that tends to find any break in its routine disastrous, Pi is pliable, versatile, and resourceful. Even without his devotional objects, he holds onto his religious customs, adapting them and integrating them into his daily routine. Though he is a strict vegetarian, he soon finds himself drinking turtle blood, skinning birds, and eating eyes and brains. It is easy for him to slip into a routine—he becomes a creature of a new habit.
Like the erratic motions of the ocean’s currents, this final section of Pi’s journey contains several unexpected stops and starts. First there is the storm, which Pi feels certain will cause his death. Then, the appearance of the tanker holds the potential for rescue, but ends in hopelessness. Next comes Pi’s dialogue with Richard Parker, which melds into the arrival of the French-accented castaway, whose companionship offers one sort of ending but whose murderous instincts offer a very different sort of ending. The island, too, begins as a beacon of hope, a seemingly healthful oasis that turns out to be dangerous. The real conclusion, when it comes, is sudden and unexpected. Without warning, the lifeboat lands in Mexico, and Pi is saved. The arbitrary nature of this landfall is both convenient to the storyline and emblematic of the changeable nature of the ocean, which has carried them throughout. As Pi’s situation grows more desperate, his efforts to communicate become increasingly urgent and as frequently thwarted. He waves and shouts to the passing tanker and even tries to fire off a signal flare; all to no avail. The people aboard the ship do not even notice the tiny lifeboat they nearly crush. Later, Pi sends out a message in a bottle, but it is never found. So, desperate to talk, to tell stories, he has a conversation with Richard Parker. When he bumps into another castaway, Pi talks himself hoarse, elated at the company. But, this attempt at communication also ends in disappointment: the death of his new friend. Pi’s journaling, his communion with himself, comes to an end when the pen dries up and he cannot write another word. In Mexico, he is neither able to give Richard Parker a satisfying farewell nor understand the language of his rescuers. Communication fails him at every end.
The odd natural phenomena Pi encounters illustrate his inner struggles. The floating island symbolizes Pi’s own despair. As Pi notes, it would not have killed him immediately had he stayed; rather, it would have eaten away at his soul, deadening his spirit and causing a numbing hopelessness. The carnivorous vegetation represents Pi’s pessimism, his dwindling hope that he will ever be found. To stay on the island would be to give up, to decide to end his days on a man-eating island rather than in civilization. Pi’s choice to leave the island and get back into the ocean is his way of remaining optimistic, however minutely, about his odds of salvation.
In the course of thirty pages, the sad tale we have been reading takes on a new and even more tragic layer of meaning when Pi reveals another version, one in which the animals are replaced by humans. Once we learn this, we immediately assume that Pi has probably made up the animal version as a way to cope with extreme tragedy. The beautiful, noble zebra represents the exotic Chinese sailor. The gutless, violent, ugly hyena embodies all the revolting qualities of the greedy, cowardly cook. The maternal orangutan, with her vaguely human body and mannerisms, represents Pi’s own mother. And the tiger is Pi himself, alternately vicious, passive, watchful, ravenous, self-contained, tamed, and feral. Both versions of the story—with and without animals—are viable, and Pi never tells us definitively which tale is true. Still, Pi seems to confess in these last chapters that he has made up his entire story as a way to cope with a shocking series of events. Only storytelling has the power to rescue him and deliver him from the absolute depths of despair. Martel tweaks the traditional rendering of animals in children’s tales to strengthen Pi’s original story and to illustrate the similarities between humans and animals. Fables and children’s stories regularly make use of anthropomorphized animal characters. However, in Life of Pi, the animals are drawn realistically and behave in ways that are true to their species. In this way, Martel enables the protagonist, Pi, to make a strong case for the believability of his Richard Parker account—something that would not be possible if, for example, Richard Parker were a talking tiger or a tiger that magically turns, against his very nature, into Pi’s best friend. Furthermore, he drives home the point that we humans are not so different from animals after all. Deprived of the luxuries and conveniences we have built up for ourselves in modern times, we resort to our basic instincts and animalistic roots. Part Three conveys the difficulty of communicating precisely and accurately. Pi tells two different stories about his time at sea. At the broadest level, this deception illustrates the ability and willingness of humans to embellish and alter the truth, to fill in forgotten details with fictions and lies. It also suggests the difficulty of arriving at a single objective truth, as opposed to differing interpretations of events. The smaller details, too, send the reader a message that it is extremely hard to use language precisely. A word is a signal or symbol used to point to things that exist in the world. Given that all of human language is metaphorical in this way, a person can never give an objective, unbiased, fact-based account. Even the tape-recorded conversation between Pi and the two interviewers is not entirely unbiased: the Japanese portions of the text are not original because they have been filtered through a third party, the translator. Okamoto’s final report, delivered to the Ministry of Transport, is also selective and subjective. Clearly, even in documents and journalistic accounts there seems to be a great deal of creative authorship involved. The bottom line, Martel seems to say, is that there can never be only one right account of a thing, event, person, place, or conversation. Experience is always open to interpretation. Part Three provides the most important phrase of the novel: “the better story.” With those three words, we come to understand that this is a book about how we choose what to believe and how we come to grips with a reality that is often more horrible that we can stand. In other words, as Pi reveals to us and to his two interviewers, the human capacity for imagination and invention is a mechanism for self-preservation. Pi is conscious that he has two stories to offer us: one with animals and one without. He is also aware that the one with animals is the more enjoyable of the two, the version that we, his audience, would much rather remember. The story with the Bengal tiger is farfetched but engaging, even charming. The version with the cannibalistic cook and the death of Pi’s mother, on the other hand, is heartbreaking and extremely upsetting. It reveals the underlying ferocity of our animal nature, something that we humans do not like to know about ourselves.
If fiction is an escape hatch or a gentler version of the truth, then religion is a lifeboat that keeps us afloat in the face of our own mortality. Both fiction and religion perform a similar function. They take the simple biological imperatives—we are born, we live, we die—and color them with narrative in an effort to make them more palatable, more personal, more digestible. All religions provide believers with a creation story, rituals for daily life, and stories that illustrate, in an indirect way, the nature of human life. All fiction supplies us with characters, settings, and language that help us get closer and closer to grasping universal truths. The significance of religion within Martel’s novel is just like that of fiction: both use metaphor, simile, allusion, imagery, and hyperbole to help us understand and live with the realities of human existence.