Life of Pi: Narrator Reliability

[David]

Throughout the book "Life of Pi," the reader must naturally question the realism of the storyline. The narrator is a youth who seems to be reliable, but his story is so fantastic - containing a tiger as the essential antagonist and briefly mentioning a "living island" - that the reader is led to question his reliability. The fact that he gives an alternate and more believable version of the events also makes the reader question the integrity of his narrative, however, he insists throughout that the more fantastic version is true. In the end we are lead to believe that he really was on a lifeboat with a tiger through continual demonstrations of Pi's character and integrity. In this way a narrator who would normally be perceived as unreliable becomes more reliable in the perception of the reader, and we believe a story we would have been less likely to, had the narrator not been such an upstanding character.