Devin Green
Mrs.Rider
English 102-102
October 24, 2015
The Life of Pi, The Better Story Some people are followers of religion, finding comfort in their religion, using it as a guide through the hardships of life. Some people rely on knowledge and past experiences to overcome adversities. Most people would either lose faith or their belief would become stronger when faced with an extreme life or death situation. When a person is in a seemingly hopeless situation will the will to survive make a person abandon religion or make his belief in god even stronger and more importantly would that person survive to tell his story? Yann Martel explores this in his novel Life of Pi. The reader follows the life of Piscine Molitor Patel through the …show more content…
In book three Pi is saved and then he is questioned by Japanese men. After Pi tells his story to the men “the reader is fully on Pi 's side and looks with smug impatience upon the Japanese officials who refuse at first to believe that he survived 227 days on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger.” (Mishra, The Man, or the Tiger). The men then ask for a realistic story one that people with believe in, Pi then tells “a superficially more plausible narrative of cannibalism and madness” and “like us, they prefer the story of the boy in a boat with a tiger.” (Kaveney, Guess Who’s for Dinner). Gregory Stephens describes the theme of Martel’s novel in three lines “You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” (Feeding tiger, finding God: science, religion, and "the better story" in Life of Pi). An imagination is what the reader needs to believe Pi’s story and a reader without an imagination will never see the meaning of the better story, a lack imagination is the reason an agnostic person will never believe in God and will miss the better story in
Mrs.Rider
English 102-102
October 24, 2015
The Life of Pi, The Better Story Some people are followers of religion, finding comfort in their religion, using it as a guide through the hardships of life. Some people rely on knowledge and past experiences to overcome adversities. Most people would either lose faith or their belief would become stronger when faced with an extreme life or death situation. When a person is in a seemingly hopeless situation will the will to survive make a person abandon religion or make his belief in god even stronger and more importantly would that person survive to tell his story? Yann Martel explores this in his novel Life of Pi. The reader follows the life of Piscine Molitor Patel through the …show more content…
In book three Pi is saved and then he is questioned by Japanese men. After Pi tells his story to the men “the reader is fully on Pi 's side and looks with smug impatience upon the Japanese officials who refuse at first to believe that he survived 227 days on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger.” (Mishra, The Man, or the Tiger). The men then ask for a realistic story one that people with believe in, Pi then tells “a superficially more plausible narrative of cannibalism and madness” and “like us, they prefer the story of the boy in a boat with a tiger.” (Kaveney, Guess Who’s for Dinner). Gregory Stephens describes the theme of Martel’s novel in three lines “You can choose your story. And a story with an imaginative overlay is the better story.” (Feeding tiger, finding God: science, religion, and "the better story" in Life of Pi). An imagination is what the reader needs to believe Pi’s story and a reader without an imagination will never see the meaning of the better story, a lack imagination is the reason an agnostic person will never believe in God and will miss the better story in