Cheesecake.
I make the best cheesecake there is on the planet, as far as I know. Really. I am expected to bring a cheesecake to every single family event, and if I don’t, I catch hell. Seriously. I honestly like my chances of winning at the California State Fair. So I am entering this year because there is apparently actual money involved at the state level. I won $15 at the the county fair which means I broke even. The judges told me to go to State with it because one can actually get money for winning, plus some corporation may pay for the recipe and slap it on their product. Cream cheese, for example. So what the hell. My kids have been entering various artworks for a few years at the fair, and my wife insisted everyone in the family should enter something, so she made her excellent chocolate cake (which won Best of Division for cakes), and I made my excellent cheesecake, and now we’re supposed to go pro, or something. Anyway.
I think Life of Pi hinges on the island. The entire book is set up in the author’s note with the promise that “I have a story that will make you believe in god.”
All of Part One, set in India, is about developing Pi’s credibility for telling the story on the lifeboat with Richard Parker in Part Two. Plus it establishes Pi’s love of religion, and his opinion that theists and atheists are brothers because they both go as far as reason will take them, and then they have to take a leap of faith (to believe in god, or to believe there is no god). He criticizes agnostics because they won’t take a leap of faith.
So then the reader goes along with Pi’s story. Then when he’s talking to the Japanese shipping representatives, they don’t believe him, and ask him for a different story. He tells the other version. Students always hit the ceiling at this point, and go berserk in class. They always want to know which version is true.
Neither version adds up, though. That’s the problem. And Martel does that deliberately. There is evidence both for and against each version of the story. And the Island is the crux of the question. So the reader has to take a leap of faith either way.
Pi asks the Japanese men – since it doesn’t matter to the shipping company either way – which version they prefer, and they say they prefer the story with the animals. Pi says, “So it goes with God.”
Which I interpret to mean that basically since there cannot be absolute conclusive evidence that god exists or god does not exist, that Pi is saying that the rational thing to do is believe in god because that’s the “better story.”
As for Richard Parker, in the “atheist” version of the story, he is Pi’s “madness,” or will to survive at any cost. It’s no accident that Richard Parker is anthropomorphized with a human name, and that Pi takes on similarities to RP throughout the book (like the way he eats and kills). They are driven closer and closer throughout the book, and once Pi hits Mexico and no longer needs that killer instinct to survive, RP disappears into the jungle.
I have not seen the movie, so I have nothing to say about that. Except I’ve heard it isn’t good, and as with all movies, crap gets moved around and modified, and people who have read the book hate the movie. As usual.
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