Tolog Review: Life of Pi

Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
reviewed by Vivian Ji

Faith, it is the most important part of a person’s mental world. With holding faith, we can be guided, and we will not be lost in our life journey, faith is a symbolization of humanity. However, when we have to make a choice between survival and faith, which one will you choose?

Pi was a 17 years old boy who grew up in his father’s zoo. In his life, he believed in three different religions, the first one is Hinduism; the second one is Christian; the third one is Islam. Those 3 religions influenced Pi very much. His father said that was ridiculous, Pi can’t believe in three different God together. Pi’s mother was the only one who supported him.

When he was 17, his whole family was on a ship and went to Canada for new life. But the ship destroyed in the storm. The 3-year-old adult Bengal Tiger, Richard Parker, was his only peer. They were afraid of and hated each other. Then, they started to live on the lifeboat peacefully. In the ending of Pi’s journey, they accepted each other. When they were saved, Pi hoped that Richard Parker would come back, but this tiger just left him forever without goodbye.

After thinking we can find that in the 2 different stories, every character is overlapped. The orangutan was Pi’s mother, the hyena was the French cook, the Taiwanese sailor was the zebra, and Pi was Richard Parker. So, the real story was the cook killed the broken-leg sailor, he fought with Pi’s mother and killed her too. Pi became angry and wild. He killed the cook, just like Richard Parker killed the hyena. In the story with tiger, Pi represented humanity, tiger represented wild. On the surface of this story, it was talking about a fighting between a human and a tiger, however it was about a struggle between Pi’s humanity and wild. At first, the human Pi hated and was afraid of the wild Pi; gradually, he started to accept and tame his wild; finally, he loved and thanked his wild, and Pi came back to the human society, his wild, “Richard Parker” left him, and went back to the jungle, never appeared again.

This story was not talking about only the tiger and the boy. It was all about faith. Faith guided Pi’s humanity, in the storm he said, “I surrender! If we can survive from that, God.” Firstly, One night, he saw the tiger under galaxy, just like the story from his mother, about the star sky in Brahma’s mouth. Secondly, Richard Parker was caught because of thirsty, and in the church, the priest asked Pi, “are you thirsty?” that hinted Jesus was suffering for human, like Pi was suffering with Richard Parker. Thirdly, the Ramadan in Islam, hinted that Pi starved on the lifeboat.

That was a journey with faith, this story perfectly explains the relationship between humanity and faith. Humanity will not changes because of faith very easily, but faith will become more glittering with humanity.