Abstract
Director Ang Lee's Life of Pi can be interpreted as an example of Henri Ellenberger's “creative illness.” A boy lost at sea for 227 days imaginatively re-creates and works through the horror of his family's death through a waking dream or vision that reframes brute reality and finds that God is “a better story.” Outer events and Pi's inner experience are worked over at several levels of narration, resembling the multiple layers of embedded tales in Indian collections of stories such as those retold by Heinrich Zimmer. Obsessed with God in many forms, Pi wrestles with Her in cruel and benevolent incarnations, achieving initiation into wisdom that leads him to his true vocation as a student of Cabbalistic theology. In the end, Pi, and his companion, the Bengal tiger Richard Parker, are set free to live “happily ever after” in the world of God's better story.
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