

He tries to understand God through the lens of each religion, and comes to recognize benefits in each one.Ī few years later in February 1976, during the period when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declares " The Emergency", Pi's father decides to sell the zoo and emigrate with his wife and sons to Canada. At the age of fourteen, he investigates Christianity and Islam, and decides to become an adherent of all three religions, much to his parents' dismay (and his religious mentors' frustration), saying he "just wants to love God". Pi is raised as a Hindu who practices vegetarianism. It opens with a goat being fed to another tiger, followed by a family tour of the zoo on which his father explains the aggressive biological features of each animal. One day, Pi and his older brother Ravi are given an impromptu lesson on the dangers of the animals kept at the zoo. In recounting his experiences, Pi describes several other unusual situations involving proper names: two visitors to the zoo, one a devout Muslim, and the other a committed atheist, bear identical names and a 450-pound tiger at the zoo bears the name Richard Parker as the result of a clerical error which switched the tiger's name with the name of his human captor. The name, he says, pays tribute to the transcendental number which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. After hearing schoolmates tease him by transforming the first name into "Pissing", he establishes the short form of his name as " Pi" when he starts secondary school.
#Life of pi ebook full
The narrator describes how he acquired his full name as a tribute to the swimming pool in France. While later recounting his life there, he proffers insight on the antagonism of zoos and expresses his thoughts on why animals react less negatively than proponents of the idea suggest. The narrator, Piscine, grows up as the son of the manager of a zoo in Pondicherry. It serves to establish and enforce one of the book's main themes: the relativity of truth.

Unusually, the note describes mostly fictional events. The book begins with a note from the author, which is an integral part of the novel.
