LIFE OF PI

SETTING
• Life of Pi is a Canadian fantasy adventure novel by
Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is
Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel, an Indian Tamil boy from
Pondicherry who explores issues of spirituality and
practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days
after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in
the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named
Richard Parker.
MAIN CHARACTER
• Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) - The protagonist of the story. Piscine is the
narrator for most of the novel, and his account of his seven months at
sea forms the bulk of the story. He gets his unusual name from the
French word for pool—and, more specifically, from a pool in Paris in
which a close family friend, Francis Adirubasamy, loved to swim. A
student of zoology and religion, Pi is deeply intrigued by the habits and
characteristics of animals and people.
• Richard Parker - The Royal Bengal tiger with whom Pi shares his lifeboat.
His captor, Richard Parker, named him Thirsty, but a shipping clerk made
a mistake and reversed their names. From then on, at the Pondicherry
Zoo, he was known as Richard Parker. Weighing 450 pounds and about
nine feet long, he kills the hyena on the lifeboat and the blind cannibal.
With Pi, however, Richard Parker acts as an omega, or submissive,
animal, respecting Pi’s dominance.
PLOT
• born Piscine Molitor Patel, grows up in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, where his father runs the zoo. A precocious and intelligent boy, by the age of fifteen
Pi—Hindu from an early age—has also adopted Christianity and Islam, and considers himself a pious devotee to all three religions.
• Thanks to government upheaval that has long been distressing Pi’s father, the Patels decide to close the Pondicherry Zoo and move to Canada when Pi is sixteen.
Pi, his mother, father, and brother Ravi all board the Tsimtsum along with the zoo’s animal inhabitants (who are on their way to be sold around the world).
• An unexplained event causes the Tsimtsum to sink, and Pi is the only human to make it onto the lifeboat and survive. Along with Pi, the lifeboat contains a
hyena, a zebra, Orange Juice the orangutan, and Richard Parker the tiger. The hyena kills and devours both the zebra and Orange Juice, before Richard Parker
kills the hyena. Pi is left alone on a lifeboat with an adult male tiger.
• There is no land in sight and the ocean is shark-infested, so Pi builds a raft which he attaches to the lifeboat, to keep himself at a safer distance from Richard
Parker. Eventually, however, life on the raft proves too exhausting, and Pi realizes that if Richard Parker gets hungry enough, he will swim to it and kill Pi. So Pi
decides that he must tame Richard Parker. Using a whistle, seasickness, and a turtle-shell shield, Pi manages to assert his authority over Richard Parker and
delineate his own territory on the lifeboat, where he is comparatively safe from the tiger.
• While at sea, Pi and Richard Parker face many challenges, traumas, tragedies, and miraculous occurrences. They never have sufficient food and fresh water, and
the constant exposure is highly painful. A severe storm, which they miraculously survive, destroys the raft. Pi manages to capture and kill a bird. They are almost
crushed by an oil tanker, which then passes by without seeing them.
• During an especially severe period of starvation, Pi and Richard Parker both go blind. While blind, Pi hears a voice, and realizes that they have drawn near
another lifeboat that contains a similarly starving and blind Frenchman. Pi and this man converse for a while, and bring their boats together. The Frenchman
climbs onto Pi’s boat, and immediately attacks him, planning to kill and eat him. He doesn’t realize that there is a tiger on the boat, however, and accidentally
steps into Richard Parker’s territory. The tiger immediately attacks and kills him. Pi, saved at the cost of his attacker’s life, describes this as the beginning of his
true moral suffering.
• Pi and Richard Parker come upon a weird island that is made of algae with trees protruding from it, teeming with meerkats but no other life. Pi and Richard
Parker stay on the island for weeks, eating the algae and the meerkats, growing stronger, and bathing in and drinking from the fresh water ponds. They never
stay on the island at night, however, Pi because he feels safer from the tiger in his delineated territory, and Richard Parker for a reason unknown to Pi. Pi
eventually starts to sleep on the island, and while doing so realizes that the island is carnivorous—it emits acid at night that dissolves anything on its surface.
Greatly disturbed by this, Pi takes Richard Parker, and they leave the island.
• Pi and Richard Parker eventually land on the Mexican beach. Richard Parker immediately runs off into the jungle without acknowledging Pi, which Pi finds deeply
hurtful. Pi is found, fed, bathed, and taken to a hospital. There, two Japanese men come to question Pi about what caused the Tsimtsum to sink. He tells his
story, which they do not believe, so he offers them a more plausible version, with the animal characters replaced by other humans, which casts doubt on the
original story.
• Throughout the novel, the story is interrupted by the author’s notes on Pi as he is now, telling this story to the author. After recovering in Mexico he went to
Canada, where he spent a year finishing high school and then studied Religion and Zoology at the University of Toronto. At some point, he got married, and he
now has two children. He still thinks of Richard Parker, and is still hurt by his final desertion.
NARRATIVE DEVICES
• There are many different ways to narrate a a novel, short story, or essay.
One such way is the omniscient narrator, who is all knowing and seeing. The
omniscient narrator knows and tells us the inner thoughts of a story's
characters.
• There is also the first person narrative style, which is when a writer creates a
narrator who speaks in the first person address. For instance, if you were to
tell a story about a personal experience, you would recount it it in the first
person. Lastly, there is the second person narrator, which means the
narrator writes to a person or people, sometimes even to the reader.
• In Life of Pi, Yann Martel creates a protagonist, Pi, who narrates his story in
the first person, but he also creates an omniscient narrator in select
chapters. Martel also creates an additional first person narrator at the end
of the novel. Life of Pi has two narrative styles presented by three different
narrators.
THEME
• Belief in God
• Belief in God is clearly a major theme in Life of Pi, and has been the most controversial in reviews of the book.
Throughout the novel, Pi makes his belief in and love of God clear—it is a love profound enough that he can
transcend the classical divisions of religion, and worship as a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi, although
amazed by the possibility of lacking this belief, still respects the atheist, because he sees him as a kind of
believer. Pi’s vision of an atheist on his death bed makes it clear that he assumes the atheist’s form of belief is
one in God, without his realizing it until the end. It is the agnostic that truly bothers Pi; the decision to doubt,
to lack belief in anything, is to him inexcusable. This is underscored in that essential passage in the novel when
Pi asks the Japanese officials which of his two stories they preferred—he sees no reason why they should not
believe the better story.
• Pi’s devotion to God is a prominent part of the novel; it becomes, however, much less prominent during his
time aboard the lifeboat, when his physical needs come to dominate his spiritual ones. Pi never seems to
doubt his belief in God while enduring his hardships, but he certainly focuses on it less. This in turn
underscores the theme of the primacy of survival.
• The Primacy of Survival
• The primacy of survival is the definitive theme in the heart of the book, Pi’s time at sea. This theme is clear
throughout his ordeal—he must eat meat, he must take life, two things which had always been anathema to
him before his survival was at stake. Survival almost always trumps morality, even for a character like Pi, who is
deeply principled and religious. When Pi tells the second version of his story to the Japanese men, this theme
is highlighted even more vividly, because he parallels his survival instincts in the second story to Richard Parker
in the first—it is he, when he must survive, who steals food, he who kills the Frenchman. If the first version of
the story is seen as a fictionalized version of the second, the very fact that he divides himself from his brutal
survival instinct shows the power of that instinct.