Da Rap Game's Responce/Ideas

Dear Mrs. Huryn,

Our group, Da Rap Game, has come to a consensus. You win. You, Yann Martel, Elie Wiesel, all of you win. The members of my group have come to a point where we question everything we do. We cannot simply read a story anymore; we now feel the need to second-guess ourselves. To question everything we are told. It is no longer a simple black and white scenario; we’ve found acres upon acres of gray areas we become entangled in.

For example, when reading the Life of Pi, many questions come to the reader. All of them are unanswerable. Lil’ Wayne says that when she was reading Life of Pi she “felt like [she] was dropping acid and doing meth half the time [she] was reading”. A question as simple as “What is Life of Pi about?” is impossible to answer. While looking at online reviews of this book I have found that it can be categorized as a survival story, a tall tale, an action piece, a work about human/animal relationships, and a fiction about (1) India, (2) adolescence, (3) zoos and zoology, and (4) the Pacific Ocean, all which indicate to the reader that reviewers are grasping at anything they can find to define what essentially defies definition. The book is about all of these things - and about none of these things, really.

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel is truly astounding. He realizes that most effective way to tell a lie is to tell the truth in such an outrageous fashion as to be utterly believable. It’s a balance between “show” and “tell” in his book. In the story with out the animals he “tells” us what happens while he is at sea for 227 days. However, the story that includes the animals “shows” us what happened. Pi says, “Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?” (Martel 302). It is simply a story – an entertaining way to tell the “dry, yeastless factuality” (Martel 303) of his happenings.

In speaking of this book, our group discussions are not much of “discussions” per say, they are more debates. Confusions overwhelms all of us and we are stuck trying to figure out what to believe. It isn’t until we realize that we will never understand the true out come, that we recognize Martel has won. We have discussed the meaning of truth, the meaning of fiction and non-fiction – we have debated the entire book and everything we were told. As Lil’ Jon says, “The purpose of the novel is to cause the reader to question what they’ve read. It aims to argue the point of belief” and as a group, that is exactly what we did. Martel wins.

However, even after all the guessing, wondering, and deduction, Da Rap Game conclusively admits to enjoying the novel. As frustrated as it made us we, for some reason, love it. But isn’t that what good storing telling is all about? Hating it so much that you love it.

Regards,
Lupe Fiasco & Da Rap Game