Paper Summary:

The paper discusses the lesson in Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" that there is no one path to truth, but rather, every individual life has its own truth stemming from its own identity and experience. The paper focuses on Pi's ability to see multiple truths from widely varied perspectives and how he has moved past the negative traditions and feelings of his past without abandoning his long held beliefs. The author posits that watching him as he retells and relives his journey of discovery makes for a very enjoyable and maybe even life altering reading experience.

From the Paper:

"Yann Martel's Life of Pi is a very fanciful novel with very real commentary about the human condition and the nature of spiritual understanding. The main plot begins when Piscine Patel, a sixteen-year-old Indian boy and the son of a zookeeper who goes by the nickname Pi, is relocating along with his family and many of their animals to Canada. After a shipwreck, Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with some of his family's animals. the one that gives Pi the most cause for concern--and the one that survives the longest--is the Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The very strange and highly dangerous situation Pi finds himself in as a shipwreck survivor along with a carnivorous and territorial animal, as well as other details of his life, provide a large impetus fr reflection, and in fact the most important portions of the book actually deal with Pi's thoughts on life, reality, and religion. Ultimately, the lesson of Life of Pi as it is revealed to the title character and to the reader is that there is no one path to truth, but rather that every individual life has its own truth stemming from its own identity and experience."

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