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Life Of Pi And Religion Essay

Decent Essays

Religion as an Affirmation of Desire

In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”, a mysterious old man with wings is found in a village. The family that has found him place him in a chicken coop, where crowds soon flock to so that they may pay a fee to see him. In the Life of Pi, Piscine recounts to a writer the story about his childhood experience of being stranded in the ocean. He claims to have been accompanied on a lifeboat by zoo animals, most notably a tiger named Richard Parker. In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and in Life of Pi religion takes the role of a fantasy invented to satisfy the desire for a more satisfying reality. In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” García Marquez reveals that to the villagers and tourists who go to see the old man religion is a plaything to satisfy their ears, which ache for a good story. In Marquez’s narration, he deliberately comments that the married couple which discovers the old man “quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm” (357). The couple thereby already has come to a satisfactory conclusion for the time being. However, the couple then deliberately goes on to ask for a second opinion from someone who could answer from the perspective of “everything about life and death”: the neighbor responds “He’s an angel”. Marquez contrasts the …show more content…

The family that has found him place him in a chicken coop, where crowds soon flock to so that they may pay a fee to see him. In the Life of Pi, Piscine recounts to a writer the story about his childhood experience of being stranded in the ocean. He claims to have been accompanied on a lifeboat by zoo animals, most notably a tiger named Richard Parker. In “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and in Life of Pi religion takes the role of a fantasy invented to satisfy the desire for a more satisfying

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