If fiction is an escape hatch or a gentler version of the truth, then religion is a lifeboat that keeps us afloat in the face of our own mortality. Both fiction and religion perform a similar function. They take the simple biological imperatives—we are born, we live, we die—and color them with narrative in an effort to make them more palatable, more personal, more digestible.
All religions provide believers with a creation story, rituals for daily life, and stories that illustrate, in an indirect way, the nature of human life. All fiction supplies us with characters, settings, and language that help us get closer and closer to grasping universal truths.
The significance of religion within Martel’s novel is just like that of fiction: both use metaphor, simile, allusion, imagery, and hyperbole to help us understand and live with the realities of human existence
The quotation can also be considered in the context of Pi’s second story, the one without animals, in which Pi himself is......
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