For Love of the Better Story

This is one of my favorite endings to a book that I have ever read. I’m not sure why I love it so much beyond the fact that the concept of the “better story” intrigues me. I had to pause and think about the two endings and the way the stories intertwined. If I were thinking of just the concept of the better story I would go for Pi’s story that includes Richard Parker. However I have to take into account the other ending as well, the Japanese businessmen took for granted at first look that it was true. I loved Pi’s remark that just because it was outside of their realm of experience does not mean that because it is improbable it is impossible. Everything in Pi’s life up to that point had prepared him to be capable of dealing with just such an event. Yet to survive for 7 months in a lifeboat with a tiger, one must question the factuality of the story.
While I was considering whether or not the story was true I thought of The Things They Carried, how Tim O’Brien talked of story truth and of happening truth and I realized that in the end it doesn’t matter to me whether or not Richard Parker was living on the lifeboat. I, like the Japanese businessmen in the end decided that I would believe the better story. ‘Mr. Piscine Molitor Patel showed astounding courage and endurance in the face of extraordinary difficulties. Very few men can claim to have survived so long at sea, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.