Life of Pi Lesson Plan

What do you think Pi means when he says, “A plague on fundamentalists and literalists?”

Here, Pi is alluding to his belief (very important to the novel) that there can be multiple truths, or multiple versions of the truth. A literalist would interpret religious texts as objective, historical fact: for example, that there really was a woman called Eve and she really was created out of the rib of a man named Adam. A fundamentalist would insist that only one system of beliefs was the correct one, and that all others are wrong and heretical. Pi is neither of these things: he prioritizes the personal meaning of religion over concerns over whether or not the stories of that...