Life of Pi is a story within a story within a story.

The novel is framed by a (fictional)

note from the author, Yann Martel, who describes how he first came to hear the fantastic tale
of Piscine Molitor Patel. Within the framework of Martel’s narration is Pi’s fantastical first-
person account of life on the open sea, which forms the bulk of the book. At the end of the
novel, a transcript taken from an interrogation of Pi reveals the possible “true” story within
that story: that there were no animals at all, and that Pi had spent those 227 days with other
human survivors who all eventually perished, leaving only himself.

Pi, however, is not a liar: to him, the various versions of his story each contain a
different kind of truth. One version may be factually true, but the other has an emotional or
thematic truth that the other cannot approach. Throughout the novel, Pi expresses disdain for
rationalists who only put their faith in “dry, yeastless factuality,” when stories—which can
amaze and inspire listeners, and are bound to linger longer in the imagination—are, to him,
infinitely superior.

Storytelling is also a means of survival. The “true” events of Pi’s sea voyage are too
horrible to contemplate directly: any young boy would go insane if faced with the kinds of
acts Pi (indirectly) tells his integrators he has witnessed. By recasting his account as an
incredible tale about humanlike animals, Pi doesn’t have to face the true cruelty human
beings are actually capable of. Similarly, by creating the character of Richard Parker, Pi can
disavow the ferocious, violent side of his personality that allowed him to survive on the
ocean. Even this is not, technically, a lie in Pi’s eyes. He believes that the tiger-like aspect of
his nature and the civilized, human aspect stand in tense opposition and occasional
partnership with one another, just as the boy Pi and the tiger Richard Parker are both enemies
and allies

The entire novel is based on a story within a story, within a story. In fact, there are so
many different levels it is hard to understand what the truth really is. This is the whole point.
The reason there are so many complex levels of storytelling interweaved into the play is to
demonstrate how one’s point of view makes all the difference in the world.

Essentially, the author, Martel explains how he has come to hear the story of Pi, who
then tells his story about his journey at sea with Richard Parker and the other animals.
However, at the end it is revealed that this was actually a story to explain the “true” story that
he was surrounded by humans who committed those harsh deeds as a way to survive. Finally,
the Interrogators are left to pick and choose which story to tell.

The importance of storytelling comes down to the idea of truth. The truth is simply too
traumatic for young Pi and thus he makes up a story about animals as a way to soften the
reality and escape the horrific truths about what humans are capable of. Furthermore, by
creating this story within the story, Pi is able to pass on his horrifying acts to his alter ego, the
Bengal tiger. Pi does not have to come to terms with his violent side that allowed him to
survive.

Life of Pi is a masterful and utterly original novel that is at once the story of a young
castaway who faces immeasurable hardships on the high seas, and a meditation on religion,
faith, art and life that is as witty as it is profound. Using the threads of all of our best stories,
Yann Martel has woven a glorious spiritual adventure that makes us question what it means
to be alive, and to believe.
Growing up in Pondicherry, India, Piscine Molitor Patel -- known as Pi -- has a rich life.
Bookish by nature, young Pi acquires a broad knowledge of not only the great religious texts
but of all literature, and has a great curiosity about how the world works. His family runs the
local zoo, and he spends many of his days among goats, hippos, swans, and bears, developing
his own theories about the nature of animals and how human nature conforms to it. Pi’s
family life is quite happy, even though his brother picks on him and his parents aren’t quite
sure how to accept his decision to simultaneously embrace and practise three religions --
Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam.
But despite the lush and nurturing variety of Pi’s world, there are broad political
changes afoot in India, and when Pi is sixteen his parents decide that the family needs to
escape to a better life. Choosing to move to Canada, they close the zoo, pack their
belongings, and board a Japanese cargo ship called the Tsimtsum. Travelling with them are
many of their animals, bound for zoos in North America. However, they have only just begun
their journey when the ship sinks, taking the dreams of the Patel family down with it. Only Pi
survives, cast adrift in a lifeboat with the unlikeliest of travelling companions: a zebra, an
orang-utan, a hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Thus begins Pi Patel’s epic, 227-day voyage across the Pacific, and the powerful story of
faith and survival at the heart of Life of Pi. Worn and scared, oscillating between hope and
despair, Pi is witness to the playing out of the food chain, quite aware of his new position
within it. When only the tiger is left of the seafaring menagerie, Pi realizes that his survival
depends on his ability to assert his own will, and sets upon a grand and ordered scheme to
keep from being Richard Parker’s next meal.
As the days pass, Pi fights both boredom and terror by throwing himself into the
practical details of surviving on the open sea -- catching fish, collecting rain water, protecting
himself from the sun -- all the while ensuring that the tiger is also kept alive, and knows that
Pi is the key to his survival. The castaways face gruelling pain in their brushes with
starvation, illness, and the storms that lash the small boat, but there is also the solace of
beauty: the rainbow hues of a dorado’s death-throes, the peaceful eye of a looming whale, the
shimmering blues of the ocean’s swells. Hope is fleeting, however, and despite adapting his
religious practices to his daily routine, Pi feels the constant, pressing weight of despair. It is
during the most hopeless and gruelling days of his voyage that Pi whittles to the core of his
beliefs, casts off his own assumptions, and faces his underlying terrors head-on.
As Yann Martel has said in one interview, “The theme of this novel can be
summarized in three lines. Life is a story. You can choose your story. And a story with an
imaginative overlay is the better story.” And for Martel, the greatest imaginative overlay is
religion. “God is a shorthand for anything that is beyond the material -- any greater pattern of
meaning.” In Life of Pi, the question of stories, and of what stories to believe, is front and
centre from the beginning, when the author tells us how he was led to Pi Patel and to this
novel: in an Indian coffee house, a gentleman told him, “I have a story that will make you
believe in God.” And as this novel comes to its brilliant conclusion, Pi shows us that the story
with the imaginative overlay is also the story that contains the most truth.

Pi likes the thought that anything is possible in a story. It is interesting to him what the
mind can come up with. Throughout the book, Pi talks about many stories that have to deal
with human interactions with people. Thus introducing the reader into his hobbies, which are
storytelling and studying animals.
Pi’s mind and remembrance of better times helped him maintain sanity and hope while on the
raft.We cannot be sure that everything Pi says that happened on the raft is factual because of
his fondness of storytelling, meaning he could have made a lot of it up.
In a way, Storytelling is a gateway into religion. After all, all religions base their beliefs off
of storytelling and are a central point of the core belief of a relgion.
 In this review of Life of Pi, I argue that this is a magical tale which rediscovers the
power of the child's fairy-story. In the process it makes even the atheist, literary critical
reader want to believe in God, and want to enjoy the story in its own way, rather than seeking
to (over)interpret it.
Life of Pi is intended, so Martel tells us, to make the reader believe in God. This bold,
apparently evangelical, premise locates it on a dangerous moral high ground. D.H. Lawrence
warned against using the novel as a forum for the author to assert his own moral or religious
belief:
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts
his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
(D.H. Lawrence, "Morality and the Novel")

Aesthetically, the fiction which reveals a truth by explicit sermonising rather than as a
natural conclusion drawn from the relationships and events it presents, is displeasing, even
"immoral." Indeed, Martel's statement is likely to have the opposite effect on his reader,
provoking a determined counter-reaction not to succumb to a didactic religious agenda.
Surely enough, Life of Pi fails to meet its ambition. As he travels through its pages,
apparently on the Damascun road to enlightenment, the reader will not, atheist or already
committed follower, experience some major revelation to the spirit, coming to, or restoring, a
belief in God. Nor, despite Martel's explicit but deceptive statement, is he intended to.
Instead, Life of Pi achieves something more quietly spectacular: it makes the reader want to
believe in God.