By now, you’ve probably heard all the theories. Talk to a Freudian and you may hear that Richard Parker, the fearsome Bengal tiger in Life of Pi is really the id manifestation of the title character as he struggles to survive alone in a lifeboat with a predator definitely too close for comfort.
If, on the other hand, a former lit major is bending your ear, then of course the Freudian stuff is all nonsense. In that case you’ll hear that Richard Parker is actually a stand-in for the cook, who ate Pi’s mother and who was, in turn, eaten by Pi himself. Don’t even bother objecting because you’ll only be pointed to the ending with the insurance guys as proof positive that Pi was fibbing about all the animals.
A form of denial, the lit major will say. Coping mechanism to deal with post-traumatic stress. You know how absolutely unreliable those lost-at-sea types can be. The lit major probably had a minor in psychology.
Contrast that take with one proffered by those of philosophical or spiritual leanings and you may well find yourself debating over the notion posited by the character Mamaji – that Pi’s transcendent ordeal is sufficiently compelling to produce a belief in God.
What are we to do with a story with so many seemingly loose ends?
Long story short, most of us default to confirmation bias mode. Based on our individual experiences, we chose some part of the story to believe in, and then we run with it, niggling over troublesome narrative details until we can make them fit with our expectations and outlook.
Why we do so ends up being embedded in a larger question of identity, about the nature of the human beast and about whether or not we are cognitively predisposed to belief.
We probably are.
Research over recent decades suggests as much.
“Believing is our default state, so it comes to us naturally,” according to Emory University psychologist Scott O. Lillienfeld and Robert Byron, a Connecticut attorney whose criminal appeals practice specializes in psychiatric advocacy (“Your Brain on Trial,” ¬Scientific American Mind, Jan./Feb. 2013), “so it comes to us naturally; disbelieving does not.”
If it is true that there are two basic modes of human thinking, as Princeton psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman contends in his 2011 book Thinking: Fast and Slow, then we may have to put one of them at least temporarily on hold to make sense of either the novel or theatrical version of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. That is, we may have to believe quickly before we contemplate slowly.
Turns out, that’s not such a stretch.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert conducted a 1990 study in which subjects being asked about the validity of true/false statements were momentarily distracted before being allowed to answer. There was a catch. The statements subjects were being asked to evaluate had to do with definitions of words from a language they didn’t speak.
When their evaluative processing was derailed by deliberate distractions built into the test parameters, subjects were more likely to assume that the true/false statements offered actual definitions of the words they did not know. Distraction short-circuited their critical analysis and they defaulted to belief rather than disbelief.
Questions about belief are sure to be at the heart of nearly any discussion of Life of Pi. The story’s title character assumes the name of an irrational number. And he believes not just in Vishnu and Jesus, but a whole host of other gods culled from an assortment of world religions. His father finds that odd, to say the least.
Dad was probably what Princeton’s Kahneman would call a slow (and therefore more analytical) thinker. Probably would have been an outlier in the Gilbert true/false distraction study. Odds are that Pi himself – a Kahneman fast (and therefore more intuitive thinker) would have fit right in.
So Pi is a believer. And he tells us a fantastic tale that we take at face value – at least right up until the end when he tells a different story tailor made to suit the tastes of the disbelieving insurance guys.
And then we have to wonder: did we just get duped?
Was the tiger Pi’s fearsome id image? A substitute for the cook? A metaphor for the trials of a faith-based life? As beings with a cognitive predisposition to believe, we’re each likely to intuitively adopt a version of Pi’s story as true, then analytically sift for evidence to back our claim.
Mamaji said Pi’s story would compel a belief in God.
And it might.
But the belief-embracing Pi himself would be hard pressed to say where God resides.
I once trained dolphins for a living, and I recognized in Pi’s struggles with tiger Richard Parker some of the behavioral conditioning approaches and tools of my former trade. Pi bungled at first, confusing both himself and his feline companion with mixed messages.
But he worked it out.
He used a training whistle to establish communication. He used a target pole to create boundaries. Eventually, he arrived at a place of trust and partnership – the defining destination of any successful relationship. A spiritual journey through behavioral conditioning? If we are hard-wired to believe, what is it we believe in? And, while lost at sea, alone in a lifeboat with danger ever-present, could Pi have really tamed the tiger? I like to think so.
Copyright © Seth Slater, 2013