Monday, October 03, 2005

 

Section 3: Chapters 8-14

Pi's father taught his two sons a lesson. He started out powerfully, making them watch a tiger maul and kill a goat. He then went on to show them the other animals of the zoo, giving the children short stories about people that had been hurt or killed by each animal. He ended his lesson by showing them the guinea pigs, and told them that they were only safe because they had been domesticated. In the wild, they would have chewed their fingers off.
What does all this have to do with the reader? Maybe Martel is saying that lessons often have to be given to keep people on track and/or safe. Sometimes, lessons are difficult to learn, but these oft have the greatest and longest-lasting impact..
I know this applies to my life, even, and one instance, especially, comes to mind. Several years ago, I did something really stupid, was caught and apologized to everyone involved. In the process, I ended up confessing to my parents that I had done other stupid things, and from that point on, I have avoided all those bad habits. A difficult lesson taught me a lot, and protected me from a dangerous path.
What I've gathered from today's reading is that knowing an animals - any animals - reasoning and behaviors gives us an advantage over that animal. It provides insight so we can dominate them and protect ourselves from them.
This applies equally to both lesser animals and humans. Knowing the mind of man allows us to protect ourselves from dangerous people, or better yet, change their thoughts and actions by changing certain determining factors before they become dangerous.
For example, if all serial killers are such because they heard the word 'kill' and/or its variations more than 3032 times, regardless of which kind of home they grew up in, or friends they hung out with, or religion they followed, we would no longer have serial killers on our streets. We would decrease the number of average occurrences of the word 'kill' so that in a span of 100 years, it would be nearly impossible to hear the word the specified number of times, and then, nobody would grow up to be a serial killer.
Now, this same formula could be applied elsewhere, as well. Think of the problems we could solve in the world, just by knowing the value of each variable in the formulas:
factor A + factor B (x times) + factor C (y times) = thief
factor F + factor D = terrorist
etc, etc
So, maybe Martel is saying that we should learn more about the human psyche in order to learn WHY people are troubled in our societies, and change those things, before something REALLY bad happens.

Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?