Saturday, November 7, 2015

In Life of Pi, the title character repeatedly calls the usefulness of "reason" into question. How does Pi criticize "reason" throughout the novel?

Well done for noticing this. It seems that the whole novel
presents the power of reason alone as being unsuitable and incapable of processing and
dealing with the vicissitudes of life as experienced by Pi. One classic example of this
comes in Chapter 37, when the ship sinks, and Pi struggles to make sense of what he sees
around him:


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Every single thing I value in life has been
destroyed. And I am allowed no explanation? I am to suffer hell without any account from
heaven? In that case, what is the purpose of reason, Richard Parker? Is it no more than
to shine at practicalities--the getting of food, clothing and shelter? Why can't reason
give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?
Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to
catch?



The entire novel seems
to point towards the limitations of reason, as Pi adopts three different and supposedly
mutually exclusive religions, and then finds that being stranded on a boat in the middle
of the ocean is about so much more than mere survival, as his various encounters show.
Perhaps the attack on reason is most eloquently captured in the two different stories of
Pi and what happened to him, that he shares with the two Japanese characters. Reason
alone seems to be lacking in our need to tell stories to make sense of our universe and
our role in it. Reason alone, as the quote suggests, is unable to give "greater answers"
and thus the imagination must fill in what is left blank by the forces of
reason.

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