Life is a Story

A/N: This is the final essay response to the book Life of Pi by Yahn Martel. This was a very difficult essay for me to write and it was difficult for me to get input that helped me fix it from my original essay which did not turn out very well at all. I believe that this is a much better essay than what I had before so please let me know what you think. The quote used in the third paragraph is from page 334. The quote in the fourth paragraph is from page 336. There are two quotes in the fifth paragraph, the first from page 325 and the second from page 334. The quote in the conclusion is from Edgar Allen Poe.

Fiction is fake, made-up along with stories they are too, made-up but that is only sometimes the case. Stories come to life from the imagination of their creator; they are in fact most often a telling of events shaped by the life of the teller or writer. Telling a story can be many things, it can be talking about the person's story; their life story as it is known by many. Everyone has their own observations, experiences, and opinions of things; when telling about the, same event it can come out completely different from one person to another. Pi's life is a story, life in general is. Life is a story that keeps unfolding.

In the book Life of Pi, Pi tells two stories regarding his adventures between the time the Tsimtsum sinks and when Pi comes back into human society. Pi claims both tales to be true. Both sagas are not what others would view as a credible accounts of what happened. Mr. Okamoto's report says that nothing like the stories that Pi tells has ever happened with other shipwreck survivors. People can choose to believe or not, but they cannot choose to believe nothing in response to such a story. Had there been another person present the tale may have had yet a third unique re-telling of the trip on the life boat.

There are two stories that Pi tells, both are the truth and neither are fact. One is using animals, and the second replaces those animals with humans that have very animalistic behaviors. For all that can be determined, Pi could have been in a coma for the majority of the time he spent on the life boat and that both of his stories could just be as simple as being only dreams and nothing more. The Truth to the matter is that facts do not exist, the only thing that people can know for certain is what they see with their own eyes or witness with their senses. A fact in one's opinion could always be an opinion in another's. "'You can't prove which story is true and which is not. You must take my word for it.'" This is similar to the way rumors and gossip work with people making up stories about other people and then it is the decision of who it is coming to whether they think it is true or not. Life is the same way, a story told from one is completely different from another.

The two men that interrogate Pi don't think that he is giving the hard core facts when he reiterates his story for them. Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba don’t understand that Pi’s experience on the life boat is what he says. He came up with the story to help him stay somewhat sane. “Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and non in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.” The tiger never actually was there, Richard Parker was in Pi’s mind, allowing Pi to use him as a survival mechanism so that although he was completely alone something was keeping him company in his mind. No one believes Pi’s story about the tiger because there never actually was one, it was all part of his story.

"`Uhh ... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the `straight facts', as you say in English.'" Mr. Chiba and Mr. Okamoto only think that Pi is making his story up because there is nothing to prove it, no remains; that causes them to think that he just invented it. There is nothing, the tiger is gone; but that's because the tiger never existed in the first place. Stories just cover up and change the truth because the truth is all that we really can know. Pi thinks that he is telling the truth, he thinks that he is telling two stories that in his mind are both correct, but it is up to the interviewers to decide which one that they like best. “`So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without animals?’” In both stories the characters do the same things and are the same. In both stories whether people or animals all the characters act like animals.

Life of Pi is a story and no more; it is a story that is teaching us first about the life that Pi lived from the time the ship sunk and when he came back into civilization. It wants us to challenge what is real and not in life. Knowing no one sees the same exact thing with the eyes they have to see it teaches us something about reality. There is nothing in life that is the same for two people; everything has truths to it and one's life's story is about what the person telling it thinks and knows. We really don't know what was true or untrue; it is up to the reader to pick what they want to think. Life is in fact only a story because it can be what you makes it; it is just an unconscious state of thought. "All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream."