Well, there's plenty of adventure here, enough to please the most discerning action-seeking reader. But it's also a question of reality–even exaggerated reality–as to this episode in Pi's young life.
As I ended my last post, does it really matter? Fiction is, by definition, blatantly not real, though of course, all words, sentences, story ideas, etc. are based on some experience–even via reading–of the author. Therefore, is something fiction within fiction to be doubted?
Verisimilitude demands a certain continuity of story, meaning that something like Marquez's Remedios the Beauty (100 Years of Solitude) rising up into the sky while folding sheets with the other women shouldn't be. Shouldn't be what? If Remedios isn't real (she isn't; she's a character created by GGM), then what does it mean if she suddenly behaves unrealistically?
I came upon this question early in my literary studies with Octavio Paz's My Life With The Wave. Despite the incredulous students who snickered about a wave being real, and those who insisted it was a metaphor, I took it just as the author handed it to me: the guy had an ocean wave for a girlfriend. It got realer (!) still when she become clingy and demanding and he tried to dump her. But I never doubted that she was indeed a water being, even so far as to wonder how they had sex (c'mon, it's an interesting speculation).
How do we take our magical realism? How necessary is it that we follow some sort of pattern or form when we break that pattern? Can we not, after all, inhabit a fictional world with characters who have three eyes and yet shop at Wal-Mart?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
“Lip-smacking noises”
Is Sarah Palin in the room?
Apparently not. Otherwise, I would have already swooned.