The Tiger and the Boy

When I got to the end of Life of Pi, those last 7 or so pages in which Pi tells "another story" that is similar but completely different from the previous hundred or so pages, I was horrified.

Somehow Pi's journey was significantly more adventurous, interesting and even glorified when his fellow survivors were animals and his companion was Richard Parker.

When the hyena kills the Zebra in the first story Pi tells, and the Zebra is still living while the beast devours its flesh and its organs, I was disgusted. But when Pi translated the animal scene into one with humans, my attitude shifted entirely. In the new scene, the French Cook amputates the Sailor's broken leg, of which he discreetly eats.  Then when the sailor dies, he brutally and systematically butchers the young man's body for food and bait. By this point, after only just over a page in written words, I felt sick to my stomach.

My feelings toward the violence the hyena exhibited and the violence the French Cook exhibited were different because I expected and accepted the hyena's natural instinct to kill. I did not expect and I certainly did not accept the Frenchmen's despicable lack of humanity. He seemed eager to kill, to forget his human traits and eat human flesh. Yet, how was he really different from the hyena? In fact, were he and the hyena not the same in their survival instincts, their coldness, their violence? The only difference is that the hyena is cloaked in the protection of his animalness and the Frenchmen is laid bare by his humanness.

We expect humans to maintain behavior and train of thought that is distinctly and consistently above the bar we set between us and the animal world. We expect humans to wear clothes, eat cooked meat, make economical transactions, treat one another civilly, and only revert to violence in times of war.

How quickly the human charade crumbles under strain.

I think Yann Martel wrote two versions of Pi's story to show the absurd level of honor we humans hold ourselves compared to the vision we have of animals as lowly, feral, disgusting creatures. That we expected the hyena to butcher the helpless zebra and then the sweet, motherly orangutan reveals just how little we think of animals. That we were flabbergasted, almost physically ill when the cook butchered the Chinamen and then Pi's mother shows how highly we think of ourselves.

But knocked from the seats of our tall, well-cusioned, fancy thrones and put into the wild, desperate conditions in which animals regularly live, we find that us and them--we are not so different after all.

And that, above all else, above Pi's countless sufferings and losses, is the most disturbing part in the entire book.