Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” as a novel is a coming of age story, albeit a highly unusual one in that it is about Pi growing up in extraordinarily strange circumstances and growing into an adult person not only in the absence of family and friends but he endures the trials on the lifeboat alone. These circumstances suggest that Martel is telling a new kind of coming of age story. Coming of age is how one character comes to understand the world and his place in it. Pi’s particular coming of age story is his ordering of the world, the negotiation of the rest of his life and by so doing have the world make sense given the extraordinary trauma he goes through. Pi is in a sense the perfect person to have this sort of ordeal happen to because he already has three distinct ordering principles (survival strategies) to work with: science, religion and storytelling. Which of these does he choose, and which enables him to move on and have a fruitful, happy and productive life?

Pi’s first ordering principle is Science, with Mr. Kumar and his father serving as his mentors. Mr. Kumar (biology teacher/atheist) teaches Pi to value scientific discourse. Reason and objectivity orders Mr. Kumar’s world. He is a lover of the zoo and identifies it as a place of science, a place of order itself (pg 28). Even the language attributed to Mr. Kumar is scientific (pg 28 “take the pulse of the universe, his stethoscopic mind”). Mr. Kumar also mentions his disenchantment with religion on page 30 when he says, “Where is God… God never came… Reason is my prophet.” Meanwhile, Pi’s father practices a philosophical and realist scientific stance. Father identifies a political aspect by marking science with progress. The realities of survival are important to Pi’s father, survival is unemotional and uninvolved with the uncertainty of faith. This realist perspective is more than evident in the brutal lesson he teaches Pi and Ravi with the tiger and the goat.

The second principle Pi adopts to order the world is religion. Reconciling Hinduism, Catholicism, Islam is not hard for Pi because he simply wants to love God and, therefore, he constructs a tripartite union of three religions (“I don’t see why I can’t be all three”). Pi considers this inward reality of the presence of God to be the “finest of rewards” (69), and his religious plurality reflects this thought as an honest attempt to love God as best he can. Each of these religions relies on a distinct narrative while science does not, only relying on reason and logic. Religion is known by Pi with emotion, irrationality, and a kind of unproven belief (faith).

Finally, storytelling is his final ordering principle which, not coincidentally, draws him into science and religion. While Pi’s father teaches him science and modernity, His own mother had a love of books and never did anything to discouraged Pi to read. As it pertains to storytelling, we have to decide what Richard Parker is doing here. We have to first decide if he is real, or figure out what he represents regardless if he is real or not. I interpret Richard Parker as the link between science and religion. Richard Parker is the embodiment of the identity Pi creates in order to survive the devastating loss he has endured and the harsh realities of solitary travel on the Pacific Ocean. The “miracle” (183) of a tiger and human sharing the small quarters of a lifeboat is certainly a good story, but the fact of the matter is, without Richard Parker Pi would lack the necessary will to live. The mind enables him to cope by causing a split in his personality. For example, the act of killing is justified by Richard Parker’s need and brutality. This is the science of the mind which allows Pi to survive. The storytelling or the imagining of Richard Parker allows Pi to do which he would otherwise be unable to do. Here, in fact, what we have is a combination of science and storytelling which work together to help Pi survive.

It is easy to see how religion requires faith. To say that storytelling requires faith also makes sense, as you have to believe that the storey-teller is taking you to the right place. Furthermore, it takes as much of a mental leap to believe into science as it does to have faith in religion. And this may very well be Richard Parker’s function: to serve as a link between the three distinct yet inter-related principles by which Pi orders his world within the framework of a coming of age story to eventually provide Pi, and we as the reader, with a sense of hope at the conclusion of the novel.