We all seemed to be puzzled by this peculiar episode so I thought we should work at trying to unravel it.
Here is one reviewer's opinion: "The realism that carried the reader in the erratic wake of the small boy and large tiger falters as they begin to waste away and die - and then the book gets seriously strange, with ghostly visitations and impossible islands, as though Martel wants not so much to test our credulity as entirely to annihilate it." from Justine Jordan, The Guardian Review.
Okay. Well, if Martel can entirely annihilate our credulity with a preposterous meat-eating algae island and then bring us, as readers, to believe "the better story" (the exceptionally implausible one) then he has shown (not told) us what it is to have Faith.
As a disconsolate skeptic, I still feel the impulse to dismiss the episode as an hallucinatory delusion of a dying boy. But Martel addresses that too. Somewhere in the story Pi says of atheists and agnostics - he has no trouble with atheists, but doesn't understand agnostics. Something about choosing doubt as a philosophy of life is like choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
What do you make of the island? Why does he put meerkats on it? Why not some other critter?
What if Seigfried and Roy had been on the raft?
Come back tomorrow - I've got a few parts of Richard Parker to chew on....
barbara at 1:34 PM
