Life of Pi: Unique Conclusion

"As an aside, story of sole survivor, Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel, Indian citizen, is an astounding story of courage and endurance in the face of extraordinarily difficult and tragic circumstances. In the experience of this investigator, his story is unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."

This passage is the last paragraph of Life of Pi. I thought it was an appropriate ending, because it fundamentally represents Mr. Okamoto accepting Pi's first story, and by extension, accepting God and not accepting humans and purely animalistic species. Pi presents Mr. Okamoto with the possibility of shaping life as one would like to, seeing it in its most beautiful form. While Mr. Okamoto believed Pi's second, more tragic and horrible story, he prefers the first, and so Pi tells him to believe that one. It is not clear what choice Mr. Okamoto makes, until this final paragraph, which shows him accepting the tiger story which he at first finds so hard to believe. This passage made the meaning of the book clear to me. Although before reading the book, I was not expecting this book’s ending to be what it was. I really enjoyed this conclusion and made the book very unique.