THE END POINT OF A CIRCLE

In the second half of Life of Pi we are shown the ultimate end to suffering. We are shown what happens when we are left alone, how we manifest in a new, displaced reality. Again the idea of humanity comes into question. What is the universal truth that so separates us from animals? In Pi’s case, that truth is relative. As is all truth when looked at through the lens of the ultimate end – the end of loss, complete separation from past identity, it is the end that is not death of body but a reemergence from the death of soul, or rather, the splitting of a soul.

Could Richard Parker be an alternate
reality for Pi's sense of self?
source: http://thebeliever07.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/parker460.jpg

Pi’s end comes from an early realization that, “when your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival (p. 151).” In his story he first loses an empathy that was once so easily engrained – vegetarianism – and later an empathy with far more profound consequences. Richard Parker lurks through this new reality, an example of unrestrained determinism, and a symbol of fear for Pi. But what does the tiger on the boat threaten? We do not know if it is threatening Pi’s survival of body, or whether it threatens to overtake his moral soul. Perhaps the threats go hand in hand, and so once again, in the end, the truth may remain relative.

And what of Pi’s loss? He maintains his body. He maintains a will. A wit. A God. Even a scrap of sociability. But he does lose something profound on the boat, he loses his mother. And what is more of an ultimate end than that? Pi says, “to lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you (p. 160).” This is the final straw to sever pi from his place, to leave him disoriented in reality, and to start anew with another narrative, not of loss but of sacrifice. For a maternal chimpanzee is not a mother, a wounded zebra not a young sailor. And so the loss is not the same. It is not so much a loss at that point as it is a trade off, one life for another. Even to a zookeeper’s son, or especially to him, the circle of life is a firm reality, that is until man, until Pi, turns into the end point of the circle – and thus must work against it.

Pi suffers. Pi is lost. Pi is displaced, disoriented, removed. Yet Pi lives, and what is the most striking thing left in his life? It his ability to tell a story. To create a story where God exists, from a situation in which God, to most of us, would seem so far away. The most striking thing left to Pi at the ultimate end of his suffering is this realization – truth is relative. Truth is relative to the end one wishes to achieve. Pi’s end is the same no matter the narrative, and he asks of his interrogators, “which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals? (p. 398)” Which is the better story, the better truth? In the case of ultimate suffering, it does not matter the means to the end. A soul is left ripped open, split, allowed to create whatever meaning it so chooses. And the meaning it chooses is the meaning that keeps some semblance of human wholeness, of order, of will. And yet it is the realization that these semblances are but that, mirages on an open sea, that affirms in the end the triviality of distinction. All that is left of life is to live, so it went with Pi, “and so it goes with God. (p. 399)”

In the end absolute truth should never
be sought nor found.
source: http://www.therawdivas.com/HHH/images/truth-nextexit.jpg