Speaking about the book Life of Pi, just me wrote:
Okay I finished the book about a week ago. It was a little hard for me to get through, To be honest.
The beginning author's note that you are talking about reminded me a bit of the Book of Mormon intro. I think it was added just to make the fictional tale more fantastic and realistic. An invitation for readers to suspend disbelief.
Interesting comparison. To be honest, I almost didn't read the book because of it. Not because of the actual message, but because it seemed like something contrived to generate reading group "buzz". But you're probably right - it helps to put the reader in the mind set that this may have actually happened.
I am not sure how the story was supposed to make one believe in God. It sure didn't seem to be an argument for the existence of a god to me. I did enjoy how Pi gets involved in three major world religions.
It was a fantastic tale and humorous in parts.
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I read this when I was just beginning to grapple with the history issues in Mormonism and deciding, "What should I do? What does it mean?" For me, the novel had the opposite effect than the subtext suggested - it gave me permission to consider that belief in God really was just a preference rather than an obligation.
When Pi told the alternative ending to the Japanese interviewers, what struck me as I was reading it was this: he had projected all of the most base, animalistic characteristics of the human characters onto an animal. So when he says of the cook that he not only was evil, but he brought out the evil in Pi, I thought that Richard Parker was a defense mechanism on which Pi projected responsibility for his actions. He was just as animalistic as the tiger, the cook was as animalistic and brutal as a hyena, and his mother was just as strong but outmatched, and missing her children, as Orange Juice. But for some reason, Pi exercised a preference to avoid confronting this and reconstructed the story in a way that made him feel better about himself. That bothered me. "So it is with God" he says. And that struck me. Hard.
So when Pi asks which story the Japanese interviewers preferred, the one with animals or the one without anything they found hard to believe, it had a different effect on me than I think the author intended. He suggested that all that mattered to the hearer were a few external events and their results - the ship did sink, Pi lost his family, he survived. In either version of the story, did it really change anything of consequence? seems to be his contention. And I practically shouted, "It does!" To deny humanity in all its forms, projecting onto animals the worst in order to preserve the ideal of mankind seemed to be more than a preference without consequence to me.
Like the fictional author and the Japanese interviewers I liked the story with the tiger better. But I disagreed it was a question of preference. And with that, I thought: My preference that the church be true also doesn't matter. Either there was a tiger or there wasn't. Either Pi killed a french cook who killed his mother or he didn't. And contrary to Pi's assertion, the truth mattered. It wasn't just a preference. And so it is with God.
So, in a way, this book was a twig in the stream of my life that changed it's whole course.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, JM! And if you're thinking of seeing the movie, I enjoyed it. One of the few I'd say is worth seeing in 3D. But even without 3D, it's gorgeously shot.
