reflection/ideas/problems

The novel that we have just finished reading was called Life of Pi by Yann Martel. At the beginning of the novel we meet a young boy named Pi who lives with his family in India. Since his family owned a zoo Pi and his brother, Ravi, were always around animals. But when Pi turned sixteen that all was changing. Pi’s family had decided to move from India to Canada and by doing so they needed to sell their zoo animals. So the family and their animals got on board a Japanese cargo ship and headed towards their new destination. On the way the ship sadly sinks, Pi being the only one in his family to survive. He then was trapped out at sea in a life boat for two hundred and twenty seven days. His only companion being a Bengal tiger named, Richard Parker. Or so we thought.
When Pi was finally rescued he had to tell his story to two men who were trying to find out why the ship had sunk. The first story he told the way we read it, with the animals and everything. The two men, however, could not believe in what Pi was telling them so they asked him to tell the story again. This time Pi told the story with people instead of animals. The hyena was the cook, the zebra was the sailor, the orangutan was his mother and he was the Bengal tiger. Some parts of the story were the same while other parts were just a little different. The two men still had a hard time deciding which was true so they gave up. That was the same problem our group had.
Some of my group members felt that both stories could be true. Others thought that one was true and the other was not or that just neither story was real. Each person had their own reasons for why they felt the way they did. However, we will never really be able to tell if Pi’s story was true because we were not Pi. We were not able to go through what he went through and we are not able to speak to him. “Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” (Martel 297) Just because we did not see what Pi did does not mean his story is not real. Nobody but Pi will ever really know what actually happened during those two hundred and twenty seven days.
Other then the mystery of which story is true or not my group did enjoy reading this book. The book was entertaining and kept us guessing. Some chapters drugged on a bit and made us want to put the book down. But as we read on we came across other chapters that made us want to keep on reading. -Posh (Spice Girls group Pd: 7)