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Description:

Life of Pi tells the story of a boy and a tiger trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days... or does it?

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:05

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

00:16

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

00:19

Could you even handle someone that seriously excited about cereal?

00:22

Well, Pi had to deal with it.

00:24

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

00:29

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

00:33

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

00:35

and the ability to convincingly wield a makeshift whip.

00:38

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

00:43

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

00:48

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

00:53

But… did any of it really happen?

00:54

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

00:55

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

00:57

a tiger?

00:57

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

01:01

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

01:02

find out we were being hoodwinked.

01:03

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

01:08

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

01:14

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

01:21

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

01:26

the time that the ship went down…

01:29

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

01:34

made everything… much less real.

01:37

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

01:41

Training a tiger on the open sea?

01:45

A seaweed island chockfull of meerkats?

01:51

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

01:57

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

02:00

Is the author really asking us to decide?

02:01

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

02:02

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

02:07

we’re not really supposed to know what happened…

02:09

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

02:15

Fact?

02:16

Fiction?

02:18

Or… are we talking in circles?

02:24

Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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