Life of Pi (second blog)

I really liked The Life of Pi. I think one of the writer's themes is about loss and how to cope with that loss. When Pi fell off the ship into the water, his heart sank into the lifeboat he found himself in, along with the ship he was on that carried his family. It was then that Pi realized he would be on his own, except for Richard Parker, the Bengal Tiger. We don't realize that the story is about loss until the very end, though. When Pi is rescued, two men from a maritime department interview Pi about the sinking of the ship. Pi tells them the story of his life in the boat with the Bengal Tiger, along with a wounded zebra, an orang-utan, and a hyena, and how all these animals get eating except the Bengal Tiger. The officials don't believe Pi's story, so he tells a story where humans take the place of the animals, including his mother. His mother is the orang-utan. The hyena is the cook who kills Pi's mother for survival. It's a much more believable story to the officials. When Pi tells the story with the animals, he could be hiding from the truth about what happened to his mother. It could have been too traumatic for him to process.

In all the world, there are two types of people, the ones who hide from the truth and the ones who seek the truth. The thing is, sometimes the one who seeks the truth doesn't realize that it can come at a cost to another person's mental health. The one who hides from the truth sometimes doesn't realize that it comes out anyway, just in a different way. Either way, the truth hurts. Either way, the truth always come out eventually.