People sometimes refuse to believe things that are discrepant and perhaps a little bit absurd or odd from those that they are daily surrounded with and which they believe in. They are foolishly persuaded about the unchangeable limitations and complete explanations of everything in our world. No, it doesn’t work in this way and who believe in the necessary explanation of everything and doesn’t allow a little bit of fiction and mystery enter his or her life, is person for whom life is lost in the circle of endless question and boring answers. We might say, “I don’t need any mystery and I am sick of fiction, I want to hear only the truth.” However, one can ask, what is the real truth? Mark Twain said, “ why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction after all has to make sense.” Fiction is the extract of life and as Yann Martel said, “selective transforming of reality”(Yann Martel, VIII). Can we say that reality is the truth and a fiction is just essence of it? Looking at the realities of our world one can find amazing number of truths twisted into the fictions or vice versa and Life of Pi is perhaps one of them. What kind of relationship can we find between fiction and truth in Pi’s life. What has death and life, religion and spirituality, love and hope or animals and their mysteriousness common with realities twisted into fiction in Pi’s life? This anomaly dispersed book full of random thoughts with the extremely spiritual passages of Pi’s experiences is maybe the best source that one can reach for when searching after answers about fiction and its relationship related to truth and fiction.
Almost in very beginning of book Pi starts his story in term of life experiences related to suffering and pain plus his explanation of death and life. Life while is truly lived there is not death and that’s why death is kind of fiction for and in Pi’s life. Pi said, “the reason death stick so closely to life isn’t biological necessity-it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life keeps over oblivion lightly, loosing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of the cloud.” (Martel, pg.5)
In three-hundred-twenty-fife pages notion of death is describe many times, but never in point where Pi would want to give up his life. The life for him is something valuable and bigger than death.