Themes of Life of Pi

 The story Life of Pi has two major themes that are: the desire to live and religion. The novel is a story about a boy nicknamed Pi struggling to survive through challenging situations and seemingly insurmountable odds.

The shipwrecked inhabitants of the little lifeboat don't simply accept their fate, but actively fight against it. Within Pi’s 277 days of disaster, he abandons his life-long vegetarianism and eats fish to sustain himself. All the animals, even the severely wounded zebra battles to stay alive. Their slow, painful struggles vividly illustrate the sheer strength of living creatures’ life force. The author makes the point that every living creature has an inborn desire and willingness to live and nobody would easily give up his/her own life. In Life of Pi, the survivors from the tragic sinking of the ship often do extraordinary, unexpected and sometimes heroic things to survive. Contrariwise, they would also accomplish shameful and vicious things if pressed. At the end of the novel, Pi raises the possibility that the fierce tiger, Richard Parker, is actually the aspect of his own personality, and that Pi himself is responsible for some of the horrific events that he has narrated, including killing and sacrificing his own family for survival, it is revealed that anything could be accomplished in a life-or-death situation.

This story begins with an old man in Pondicherry telling the narrator, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” Storytelling and religious belief are two closely linked ideas in the novel. Life of Pi contains a story within a different story. In these separate stories, Pi’s three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, also come with its own set of tales. In Life of Pi, the nature of religion is used to spread the teachings and illustrate the beliefs of the faith – the faith that Pi will face as the plot progresses. Pi enjoys religious tales, but he also senses that each of these fables might simply be parts of a greater, universal story about love. Surprisingly for such a religious boy, Pi admires atheists. To him, the significant thing is to believe in something, and Pi can appreciate the atheists’ abilities to believe in the absence of God with no concrete proof of that absence.

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