Truth and Reality: A Response to Life of Pi

So in my English class the last term, we’ve been looking at the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel. This is a truly wonderful novel, and one I actually enjoyed reading.

Yann Martel addresses a lot of important philosophical questions in his novel. In some ways, Life of Pi is just bringing up again a lot of themes and ideas previously discussed by philosophers and writers in the historically recorded past, but I think they’re also things most people can relate to, and questions you ask yourself many times throughout your life.

Life of Pi, for me, was very much about what we believe as truth and reality in this world, but I felt quite strongly that it was also about whether or not truth is needed to make something good or real or changing.

I’m 15, and I think at my age a lot of people are trying to work out the world. We thought we had it sorted out when we were 5 or 7 or 9, but all of a sudden everything we’ve done is thrust into different light and what we'd decided was the world, is altered. We look back at historical events we lived through, or even just significant events in our past, and we begin to feel the real impact of them.

I was raised in a government housing complex by my mum and my memories of those flats are only good ones. It was a great childhood. I met some really lovely people, and I truly didn’t see the difference between my house, and my friends’ houses, other than I lived in a slightly smaller place and had more people around me.I used to proudly tell anyone I was with when we drove past that that used to be where I lived, and I’d point out my old room from the grid of windows.

A couple of years ago I stopped doing that.

I notice now how the concrete looks old and grungy, and the stairwells aren’t pristine. Many of the cars parked there are old models, and some have lost their number plates. There’s a general feeling of grimyness about those flats. I know, from experience, that there’s so much more inside them, but nonetheless it isn’t a housing complex I would walk through alone anymore.

But knowing, in retrospect, that those flats weren’t the best to grow up in doesn’t change my childhood experience of them. I still had a great time. And it doesn’t change what was the truth to me at the time, or any of the lessons I learnt about life during those years.

I think that as humans, we’re presented with falsehoods of reality every single day. For example, if you look at the makeup industry, people are spending thousands on dollars on powders and glitters and shades to make them look more angular or softer or more nicely shadowed. Images are presented to us that are trimmed, smoothed and slenderised. I myself often wear contacts to hide the fact I need glasses. Reality in our world is very manipulated.

Then there’s the internet, and on the Internet you can pretty much be whoever you want to be. But just because you’re presenting a new, different, enhanced or refined self, I don't think it changes the fact that it’s still coming from you and that existence is still real, even if it isn’t your whole self or a self people usually see you as. An insult commonly used when people are trying to be nasty, is to accuse another person of being “fake”. Now, I think that’s such a stupid insult, because how on earth is one meant to know what “real” means for another person, and chances are they don’t even know what real means for them.

Nobody can really present 100% of themselves anywhere, yet people still make judgements on what is presented. Relationships are constantly being broken and torn due to one person not being who another person imagines them as.

You see people affected by imaginary realities all the time in film, and music, and literature. I know for me, when a character I love dies, or loses something important, it hits me personally. And I could just pretend and imagine that they’re still there, but I know that in that world that I’ve been observing, they aren’t, and that I’m not respecting the reality being presented to me. Some people might think it’s ridiculous to cry over a book or a TV show, but when you’re in the middle of experiencing that, it is your reality and it matters just as much as anything else. The fact that it’s fiction doesn’t mean it can’t teach you anything, or change how you feel.

One of the big big themes in Life of Pi is religious belief, and I saw a massive correlation between my thoughts on religion and my thoughts on belief in Life of Pi.

Obviously Pi is hugely religious and follows three different religions. Now, I don’t claim to have any idea whether or not a higher power is real. I don’t trust my perception of reality nearly enough to tell those that theirs is wrong, either. Personally, I believe there’s Something with a capital S. 

But thinking about the truth of Gods from an objective view, if that’s at all possible, I always come to this conclusion: regardless of whether what is believed in is real, people will still believe in it. It makes them behave differently, and it changes them. Anything that is believed in enough to start wars, and movements and cause people to travel across the world to try and tell others about this belief, anything with that much power, is real. Because, and this is going to sound so cliché, what is reality? We’ve got no way of knowing. I could be in a coma right now, imagining all of this. Reality is not tangible. It is distorted and altered from perspective. One person’s belief of truth in the world is never going to be the same as another’s. So if millions of people agree on something as real, then it’s real. And if millions of other people agree on a different reality, that reality is just as true and just as much worth believing in. A truth, whether or not it's there, doesn't matter until it matters to someone.

So in reading Life of Pi, whether or not Richard Parker physically existed to me doesn’t matter. He was there, he did exist, and Pi was still changed by that experience, real or not real.

Life of Pi helped me realise that truth comes in many different versions, but in the end it’s what you believe that makes it true. Belief is the driving force in this world, without it we’d all be mad as a Hatter. While it’s good to question what you believe, or to share your beliefs with others, it’s important to remember you may be completely incorrect, and that’s okay, because the absolute truth of anything is impossible to be determined.