Pi's End of Life Explained: What's the Better Story?

If, as film critic Roger Ebert once said, "movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts", then "Life of Pi" is the one that allows the viewer, the end, to synthesize what he saw and felt with what they know about how the real world works off-screen. In a way, the end is global; it allows two or more things to be true at once, much like Pi's own spirituality.

From an early age, we see how keenly interested Pi was in religion. Growing up, he tells us, the gods were his superheroes. Born in a zoo, named after the French word for swimming pool (swimming pool, which his classmates make fun of because it sounds like "pee"), Pi describes himself as a Catholic Hindu who has was first introduced to God by Krishna. Then, after drinking holy water on a challenge, he comes to know the figure of Jesus Christ through his interrogations of a priest in the mountains of India. Soon young Pi (Santosh Patel) will also answer the Muslim call to prayer.

Faith, as Pi sees it, is "a house with many rooms". His nickname is reminiscent of the mathematical pi, "an irrational number of infinite length", much of which he memorized. Basically, Pi believes in everything. However, her father - a pragmatic zookeeper, who plays the voice of scientific reason - tells her that this is tantamount to not believing in anything at all.

While Pi is open-minded, confident, and naive enough to reach through the bars of a tiger's cage and offer raw meat to Richard Parker, Pi's father sees the ultimate danger of such blind faith. "When you look into [the tiger's] eyes," he warns, "you see your own emotions reflecting back on you."