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the ark of pi 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
to Canada. In true Noah's ark fashion, they accompany the wild animals on board the ship on their journey to the new zoos in North America. The ship sinks and Pi
Submitted by flamebolt201 on June 5, 2006
Category: Religion
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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. Martel gives the reader the democratic choice: the desire to believe rather than the belief itself. We do not have to agree with the ideology Martel delivers, but we can support to the full the way he says it, for Martel inspires the reader's desire by invoking the spirit of the fairy tale - the simple narrative which may reveal virtues and ethics yet is primarily concerned with entertaining the reader (or listener, as young children often are of such stories) in magical ways which powerfully invoke the active imagination.
Martel insures his novel against critical dialects which insist on penetrative analysis and engagement...
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