86 pages • 2 hours read
Yann MartelLife of Pi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaPart 1, Chapters 25-36Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Toronto and Pondicherry”
Part 1, Chapters 25-36 Summary
Pi continues to struggle with clerical interpretations of religion as well as his own family’s perception of Pi’s spiritual affinities. Pi opines on small-minded defenders of religion who constantly polemicize about incorrect practice without self-introspection or human empathy. He describes the clerical relationship to God as defined by “depravity” and anger (71). His discomfort with narrow-mindedness and what he perceives as spiritual depravity forces him to visit Hindu temples during the busiest hours to avoid reproach from orthodox Brahmins. Similarly, his father is embarrassed when Pi says he prays out of love for God, while his mother tries to divert Pi’s attention away from religion to books such as Robinson Crusoe, or the works of Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and R.K. Narayan.
One day, during a conversation between his father and mother on how Pi’s religious zeal contradicts their image as a modern Indian family, Pi’s father comments on Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency. Pi’s father struggles to reconcile his notion of progress and modernity with the harsh repression of the Indira Gandhi government. Pi’s father is greatly affected by this political turmoil and the dictatorial turn in India. The crackdown on constitutional freedoms compromises the family’s financial security, eventually forcing them to relocate to Canada. Pi notes that his family, while middle-class by Indian standards, are poor by Canadian standards. Pi then expounds on the concept of zoomorphism in which zoo animals ascribe their own attributes to humans or other animals such as the “rhinoceros-and-goat herd” or dogs used as foster mothers for lion cubs (84).
After several narrative interruptions in which the author meets Pi’s wife, Meena, who Pi never mentioned previously, Pi then shows the narrator photos documenting his life in Canada. Notably, few photos of his past in India have survived, although one photo does show the mysterious Richard Parker. Pi then mentions that he only remembers his mother as a “fleeting” memory (87).
The family finalizes traveling arrangements and the sale of zoo animals to various American zoos. This process is incredibly tedious and complicated and involves endless legal hurdles. The family departs from Madras port on June 21, 1977 on a large Japanese cargo ship (with a predominantly Taiwanese crew) called Tsimtsum. Pi says his mother feels anxious and sad about leaving India, asking whether they should stock up on Indian-brand cigarettes, even though she doesn’t smoke.
Part 1, Chapters 25-36 Analysis
The narrative interruptions once again cast doubt on Pi’s believability. The author is surprised when he meets Pi’s wife, Meena, as well as Pi’s two children, Nikhil and Usha, none of whom Pi mentions to him. The missing photographs as well as Pi’s fleeting memories of his mother further question the credibility of either the narrator or Pi. In some ways, however, factuality is less important than flourish. Pi is drawn to religion precisely because of its piecemeal mythology. Earlier, Pi refers to agnosticism as “dry, yeastless factuality” that is bereft of a “better story” (63). The author is, in fact, compelled by Pi’s commitment to a moral ordering of the universe, instead of rational-empirical supremacism that denies the “founding principle of existence:” love (63). Believing in any story effectively requires a leap of faith.
Pi’s mother’s efforts to distract Pi from religion with fiction might symbolize how secularists view religion: as a flight of fancy. Pi equates being Christian, Muslim, and Hindu to having multiple passports, but his mother objects that nations are real and temporal. In pantheistic fashion, Pi rejects the temporal-spiritual binary. Blurred boundaries are further demonstrated in Pi’s comments on zoomorphism. Despite seemingly impossible arrangements of zoomorphology between rats and stoats or dogs and lions, animal boundaries appear less porous than religious boundaries, which to Pi represents a failure of human religions.
Pi’s commentary on political events in India and Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency underscores the reversal of the doctrine of progress. One of modernity’s fundamental premises is the idea of never-ending human development. The myth of progress pervades secular thought, which views the human condition as inexorably moving forward. As Pi’s father says emphatically, “Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march” (74-75). Yet, he is at pains on how to reconcile his quasi-religious belief in progress with Indira Gandhi’s suspension of the constitution. While the Indian Emergency and the quashing of the opposition government in Tamil Nadu in 1976 provides the context for the family’s relocation, Martel leaves us to ponder the merits of the myth of progress. Progress, in this light, is viewed as liberation from religion—a false liberation from Pi’s perspective.
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