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Playlist Contemporary Literature (21st Century) 11 videos
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Life of Pi 25249 Views
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Description:
Life of Pi tells the story of a boy and a tiger trapped on a lifeboat for 227 days... or does it?
Transcript
- 00:05
Life of Pi, a la Shmoop. Can you imagine how terrified you’d be if
- 00:16
you were trapped on a small boat with a Bengal tiger?
- 00:19
Could you even handle someone that seriously excited about cereal?
- 00:22
Well, Pi had to deal with it.
- 00:24
Or did he? In Life of Pi by Yann Martel…
Full Transcript
- 00:29
…an older guy, Pi, tells a story about when he was younger.
- 00:33
Like all of us, his childhood was about the loss of innocence, a journey of self-discovery,
- 00:35
and the ability to convincingly wield a makeshift whip.
- 00:38
He describes in detail how his family attempted to move an entire zoo across the ocean…
- 00:43
…and about the storm and subsequent sinking of the boat…
- 00:48
…which resulted in Pi having to bunk up with a handful of mostly undesirable roomies.
- 00:53
But… did any of it really happen?
- 00:54
Of course it didn’t really happen… it’s a work of fiction.
- 00:55
But within the framework of the story, in Pi’s world at least… was there really
- 00:57
a tiger?
- 00:57
Or was he telling a little white… liger? Our first instinct is to take Pi at his word.
- 01:01
After all, we’ve stuck with him for 350 pages… it would be sorta disappointing to
- 01:02
find out we were being hoodwinked.
- 01:03
And besides, Pi makes a big deal out of us needing to have “faith.”
- 01:08
If we refuse to believe his story… aren’t we totally missing the entire point of it?
- 01:14
And yet… when we press the logic button on our brain… things don’t quite add up.
- 01:21
All signs seem to point to the idea that Pi underwent some truly awful experiences around
- 01:26
the time that the ship went down…
- 01:29
…and that the only way he could reasonably cope with it all was to fabricate a tale that
- 01:34
made everything… much less real.
- 01:37
Besides… the stuff he describes couldn’t really happen.
- 01:41
Training a tiger on the open sea?
- 01:45
A seaweed island chockfull of meerkats?
- 01:51
Either Pi is pulling our leg… or there was something in his water.
- 01:57
But maybe this is one circumstance in which… it’s okay if we don’t know.
- 02:00
Is the author really asking us to decide?
- 02:01
Or is he asking us to appreciate and revel in the uncertainty?
- 02:02
Pi’s religious devotion and love of big, unanswerable questions hints at the idea that
- 02:07
we’re not really supposed to know what happened…
- 02:09
Instead, it’s merely important that we wonder. So what’s going on here?
- 02:15
Fact?
- 02:16
Fiction?
- 02:18
Or… are we talking in circles?
- 02:24
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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