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Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.
This comment appears about halfway through Part Two, as Pi adjusts to life at sea and philosophizes on the nature of being a castaway. In an endgame in chess, most of the game has been played out and the majority of the chess pieces knocked off the board.
Similarly, after the sinking of the
Life on a lifeboat is simple, but, stripped of all else, the stakes become considerable: life or death. Pi’s life in the middle of the Pacific has no luxuries, no complex processes to participate in, and no obscure signals to follow. Faced with numerous physical dangers—Richard Parker, sharks, starvation, the blind castaway—his only real choice is whether to fight to live or to give up and die. Though he considers doing otherwise, Pi chooses to fight.
The distilled quality of Pi’s existence is similar to
the kind of bare-bones life lived by many religious mystics, for
whom stripping down to the essentials is necessary for communion
with God. A full, varied life with many distractions can cloud faith
or even make it unnecessary. However, within a spare and even monastic
existence, God’s presence becomes palpable. To put it another way,
within the confines of a lifeboat, spirituality looms as large as
a nearly
