A PRE-EVENT FORUM
Electra Street encourages those of you who are reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as part of the “Abu Dhabi Reads” program to share your thoughts and questions with the rest of us. Please leave a question or a thought about the book below.
But … no spoilers please! Don’t reveal how the book turns out in consideration of your fellow readers who haven’t quite finished it yet.
Commenters will be entered in a drawing to win passes for two to the movies. You can use them to see Life of Pi when it opens later this fall (21 November in the USA, 20 December worldwide).
[Image by Yzabelle Wuthrich]
I found the island to be possibly the most interesting part of Life of Pi. In many ways, it represents salvation: the green which the survival manual recommends looking for and similarity with paradise. Yet, I wonder what the symbolic meaning could be beyond the intrusion of reason into faith (discovering the forbidden fruit & the secrets of the island). Perhaps it hints at the necessity of struggle through reconciliation of faith & reason.
I will likely follow this up with a longer comment with proper citations – but just to see if this has piqued anyone else’s interesting, here are some of my early thoughts:
What is most interesting to me is the fact that Pi makes sense of his trials/experience aboard the lifeboat through the edifice of a tameable/controllable nature. Pi occupies four spaces indicative of different modes of the natural throughout the novel – the ocean, the island, the zoo, and (to a lesser extent) the circus. The former two appear to represent places of abundance and savagery (consider the violence and fecundity of the island that Morgante discussed above). The latter two become spaces of control and order (consider the story of the goat living with the rhinoceros). Interesting, Pi is fixated on creating these latter two spaces in his experience of the former two (for example, circus training on the island and lifeboat). The notion of “taming” Richard Parker, establishing a circus on the lifeboat, becomes a means of survival. As a result – barring an episode near the end of the novel (not being able to speak with spoilers will stunt this comment!) – Life of Pi reflects a confrontational view of nature and culture. Pi does not seem to find a way to live peaceably with nature; instead, he appears to survive by clinging to “humanity” when faced with the necessity of becoming “savage” (i.e. butchering prey, drinking turtle blood). Does this reading of Life of Pi confuse the linkage between zoology and theology introduced at the beginning of the novel?