Life of Pi

“If we citizens do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”

The author is thanking the Canada Council for the Arts, but the quote also speaks to what is constantly referred to as “the better story.” Elsewhere in the “Author’s Note,” Martel comments on fiction as the transformation of reality, which sets the philosophical tone of the novel. That the reality-illusion continuum is not limited to fiction is important for understanding Pi psychologically.

“If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur.”

Pi’s undergraduate thesis on the three-toed sloth is his second thesis, the first being on the Jewish mystic Isaac Luria. What is interesting about this passage is how its somnolent tone is consistent with Pi’s hazy, dream-like narration. That somnolence is not associated with Lurian cosmogony, but a zoological topic is significant. Zoology is supposed to be grounded in scientific, rational, and empirical inquiry, but here it is associated with a “Magoo-like blur.”

“I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.”

Pi comments on what he perceives to be a false notion that zoos and religion constrain freedom. In philosophy, there is a distinction between positive and negative liberty, the latter of which enjoys predominance in Enlightenment thought. Negative liberty refers to freedom from external restraints as opposed to positive liberty, which refers to acting upon free will to fulfill one’s potential.