Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Life of Pi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival
Religion and Faith
Storytelling
Boundaries
Summary
Analysis
Pi reflects on how the episode with the religious leaders was symbolic of the problems with many religious practitioners. People become so concerned with exclusivity and defending God that they forget to love other humans. Pi declares that when people defend God with violence or anger they are misunderstanding religion. Pi himself had to avoid zealous people who tried to condemn him for practicing more than one faith at once.
Pi condemns narrow-minded, judgmental religious practitioners in a similar way that he condemns bad zookeepers – they give both their lifestyles a bad name. As an adult he starts to recognize that everyone constrains their “liberty” in some way, the question is just which worldview one chooses.
Themes
