For my next blog/ paper I have chosen to read the Life of Pi. I have read this book twice before and seen the movie countless times and every time I reread it, something new always pops out which really interests me. If you have not read the book yet, let me just give you a little spoiler alert that the entire novel I believe is to be based around three religions that the main character, Pi Patel, focuses on. Pi is born a Hindu who then becomes a Catholic followed by becoming a Muslim. What is quite impressive about this is that he finds a way to follow each religion at the same time even though there are thousands of gods in one religion while only one in the other two. Pi’s family never seems to support his decision about which religion to choose and gives him a hard time about it. However, in the end, his father seems to pull through and be the most supportive of his son and backs Pi’s statement up about just wanting to love God.
The beginning of the novel starts out with Pi telling us of his back ground and his interest in something more than just the natural world. I find it ironic that he lives in a zoo his whole life and is familiar with evolution and biology yet he seeks what cannot be explained, that is the thousands of religions out there. That partially might be the reason why he wanted to follow so many religions in the first place.
Moving on to the tiger Richard Parker, I have done some research about that name in particular and many men with this name have been victims of cannibalism, something that stood out to me because of the fact of what happens while Pi is trying to survive with this six hundred pound Bengal tiger. Something else worth looking at would be the possibility of Richard Parker being Pi’s alter ego. I only say this because Richard Parker does the things that Pi cannot bring himself to doing. For example, killing the hyena who has a human counterpart as the cook in Pi’s second story. This alter ego could explain the lashing out of Pi’s violent behaviors.
I just wanted to through in at the end here that I love this book because it brings so many different things together and allows you to experience a different type of culture from India. It is not every day that you get to read about Vishnu and Allah along with Christ all in one novel. To conclude, I am very happy about getting to read and write a paper about the greatest book ever written, The Life of Pi.
This is indeed an excellent book and makes a great choice. I'm interested to see how your paper comes out.
ReplyDeleteI thought what you said about the name Richard Parker was really interesting. That kind of makes you look from a whole new point of view.
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