A Pluralistic Postmodern World

In Life of Pi, the protagonist, Pi Patel first offers a fantastic and vivid shipwrecktale and then a subversion of it, asserting that believing the first version, or rather,choosing the first version as the better story means believing in God. Having knownthe two versions of the story, the fictional author also agrees Pi’s story is one that hasconversionary power. To understand the novel, as this author sees it, it is important toinvestigate the reason why Pi provides two stories of what has happened and whetherhis story is qualified as one that can make people believe in God. The crux of thematter lies in Pi’s view on truth; therefore, the main thrust of this thesis is to explorePi’s worldview in light of postmodern theories, with Jacques Derrida’s and MichelFoucault’s theories on truth, in particular.By a close textual analysis of the novel, this thesis first examines Pi’s reliabilityof being a narrator, and then analyzes Pi’s seemingly pious religious behaviors with aconclusion that Pi fails to be qualified as a reliable narrator and behind his religiousbehaviors his piety rings false. Then it delves into the epistemology and ontology ofPi’s world view, pointing out that Pi’s worldview is a typical postmodern one. In Pi’seyes, life can be explained as a fantastical but believable narrative, or it can beexplained as a grittier, more rational one, and we are free to choose our story. That isto say, there is no absolute truth, so what is taken as truth is humanconstruct—subjective interpretation which is subject to one’s preference andconstituted by language. This explains why Pi tries to convince the Japaneseinvestigators of the believability of the first story, because he attempts to make a more appealing story out of what is brutal, cruel, and unacceptable. Pi decries the empiricalway to know truth, by applying and upholding imagination with which he believes hecan find God thus makes his life a better story. In the final analysis, Pi believes innothing except himself. Therefore, far from fulfilling the profoundly spiritual promise,the novel resolves that God is nothing more than a story people want to believe,because it is preferable to the alternative. By having the fictional author promising thestory to be one that can make people believe in God, the novel also implies that theconstruction of truth is subject to, to borrow Michel Foucault’s word, power. At theend of this thesis, this author warns that such relativistic worldview as Pi’s tends toyield towards nihilism.