Faith and hope coincide; wherever faith goes, hope follows. By building faith and trust in others, we can move onward through the direst of times. Trailing behind faith, though, is hope, which can become the bastion of our survival. Furthermore, that state of disparity and suffering also prompts miracles, for a young Indian boy accomplishes a feat beyond any other through religion and hope. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Piscine “Pi” Molitar Patel manages to survive out in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days alongside a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. While both fight for their lives to keep from starving, Pi finds even greater difficulty in believing he would live. Formed by the necessity and struggle to survive, man must gain hope from his trust …show more content…
As a result, faith places him into an even more vulnerable position. His faith in the divine, instead, “is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love—but sometimes it was so hard to love” (263). Releasing his heart to God, Pi allows himself to build a bond, which ultimately leads to his survival. Because he put complete trust in his faith, he discovers another person watching out for him and assisting him to remember that, “the blackness would stir and eventually go away and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving” (264). By stripping down to bare skin and leaving fate in God’s hand, Pi exposes himself to the dangers of trust. In trusting his faith, he places himself into a vulnerable position, where it becomes more difficult to believe. Nevertheless, Pi remains to trust despite after all the hardships on the …show more content…
Slowly suffering and emaciating away on the lifeboat, Pi struggles with his desire to live. At times when Pi could not rely on faith and Richard Parker as means to survive, Pi turns to himself and recognize that, “ ‘I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day’ ” (186). The moment Pi learns to believe in himself and see the entity of hope, survival becomes imminent. Unlike religion and Richard Parker, Pi cannot lose a battle within himself. Once he trusts in his own source of hope, he can overcome his conflict to survive. He no longer confines his potential in his mind and instead, believes: “I speak in all modesty as I say this, but I discovered at that moment that I have a fierce will to live” (186). Because Pi apprehends to never to give up and trust in himself, he subdues the most difficult part of survival. His inner-peace allows for perseverance and hope until the