Life Of Pi Lifeboat Symbolism

“Without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story.” The significance of this quote is that the presence of Richard saves him from the effects of loneliness. “The lower you are, the higher your mind will soar.” This quote is important because when Pi is at his lowest point, he reaches for his only remaining sources of salvation, which is his faith and imagination. “Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The element couldn’t be more simple, or the stake higher.” The quote significance is that the few that survive the ship are force to face each other in a strategic battle of wits to see who will

Pi is alone with Richard Parker on the lifeboat and they both starve and suffer with dehydration. Pi starts catching fishes for both of them. He always gives the biggest share to Richard Parker as he is the strongest. One day, he decides to eat the largest part. He wants to calm his desire for hunger. He does not want to share anything with Richard Parker. Pi starts eating like an animal. Pi tells, “It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal” (Martel 183). The innocent boy is now as dangerous as an animal that can do anything for the food. His yearning for food makes him selfish. It is in pi’s hand not to sacrifices his integrity, but he chooses to sacrifice because he knows that at this critical situation it is right to do. Even though Pi loses his integrity, he gains the power of being the strongest one on the

As Pi reaches the second level of the hierarchy of needs, he finds himself on the level of safety he needs to figure out how to stay safe while on the life boat. While Pi was on the boat he was so scared of Richard Parker that he had jumped off the boat to go in the water, but then realizes that there are predators just as scary as Richard parker or maybe even worse that he has to avoid to staying safe. “I noticed the presence of sharks around the life boat…The sharks were makos-swift, point-snouted predators with long murderous teeth that protruded noticeable from their mouths” (Martel 179). Once Pi tries to overcome his fears and tames Richard like a zookeeper would do and once he does, he ends up having a companion that helps Pi get through the struggle to survive. Pi finds an island where he is safe and is able to regain his strength but as he finds a tooth in the algae, Pi

Pi’s life before the boat crashing was full of hope and wonder. His presence was ethereal, making a purpose out of everything around him. His family ran a zoo, which gave him a tight-knit relationship with animals. Pi loved to try new things. He met new people which led to his exploration

I believe his time with the animals helped him survive as long as he did because he had another living being with him. He was surviving, but he wasn't surviving alone. I think loneliness would have gotten to him much worse if he didn't have someone else to live with. To the very end Richard Parker is Pi's rock, Pi lives so Richard Parker can live too. Pi spent a while waiting for someone to rescue him, a passing boat to see him and save him.

Desperation forced him to try and move towards the safety box that was near Richard Parker who has the ability to easily attack him. Once Pi is near the safety box he illustrates the feeling of satisfaction by saying, “oh, the delight of the manufactured good, the man-made device, the created thing! That moment of material revelation brought an intensity of pleasure -- a heady mix of hope, surprise, disbelief, thrill gratitude, all crushed into one … I was positively giddy with happiness." (Martel 141). He finds water in the box as he hoped for and this has brought him a confidence boost. Even though Pi completed the first of many stages in the hierarchy, he is still stranded in the ocean. He acknowledges the fact that animals or very territorial and in turn marks his own territory within the boat. Pi insists that, “I had to fix in his mind that the top of the tarpaulin and the bow of the boat, bordered by the neutral territory of the middle bench, was my territory and utterly forbidden to him” (Martel 168). He urinated on the parts of the boat that he claims as his part of the boat and does it in a way that Richard Parker who is an animal would understand.

-The author meets Pi’s two children and declares Pi’s story has a happy ending. Part 2: - Pi finds himself on the lifeboat, and tries to rescue Richard Parker before he realizes the danger of having a tiger on board. HE doesn’t realize that despite the danger, Parker saves him from the other animals. - The narrator returns to the night of the official sinking and tells the story of how Pi was able to escape the boat alive.

At one point, Richard Parker makes a sharp “aaonh” cry to find a mate. This means that all his needs are met because an animal will not mate unless comfort is found. Pi feels like Richard Parker until he finds the teeth on the island. When he finds them, he realizes that he will die if he remains on the island. “Ah, how I wish that moment never had been. [...] I might have lived for years [...] on that island,” shows that he is completely comfortable. Until he figured out what would happen to him over time, he did not want to leave. As nice as the island may have been, Pi finds out that he would rather be safe at

Pis motivations to help the man figure out what happened to the boat, causes him to tell the story of what he went though this time with people instead of animals. Pi spins the tale of the cook, the sailor, his mother and Himself, how they were left in the lifeboat and their interaction between them, until Pi is the only one left alive. These two stories are left to the reader to decide for himself which tale they prefer. Yann Martel shows that although Pi believes, in his heart, that the story with Richard Parker is what really happened, but wants to know what happened to the boat and why his family died, was willing to tell a tale that completely disregarded the story of Richard Parker. This shows the dedication Pi has to his

By sharing a lifeboat, Pi had a zoomorphic arrangement with Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. At first, Pi and Richard Parker did not coexist well, but then both had to adapt to living on a lifeboat with limited supplies and together they went through traumatizing experiences, such as the storm. By going through this experience with Richard Parker, Pi noticed a bond growing between them. Pi was first scared of Richard Parker, but then as time went on, he thought of him as a friend rather than an enemy. To some degree, Pi even loves Richard Parker and sees him as a human. Once the lifeboat reached Mexico, Richard Parker disappeared into the jungle unceremoniously, which troubled Pi. Humans often expect goodbyes when someone is leaving from their life and this shows how Pi had seen Richard Parker as almost human

Richard Parker, the tiger, is a symbol of Pi himself. Pi directly correlates himself with Richard Parker. If Richard Parker “give[s] up” (121) then Pi is giving up. When swimming toward the life boat Richard Parker “look[s] small and helpless” (121) much like Pi actually is. Next to the tiger, zebra, and hyena Pi is small and feeble; he has no way to defend himself against the other animals. Pi egging Richard Parker on, toward the boat; “keep[ing him] swimming” (122) shows Pi’s resilience for survival; determined for Richard Parker to survive, which is actually his determination to survive. It is often mistaken in the novel as to whether Pi is speaking of himself or of Richard Parker because they could be the same being.

While lost at sea, Richard Parker keeps Pi company. Richard Parker was captured as a young cub and raised in a zoo. He is used to being controlled by people and as Pi discovers this, he takes control of Richard Parker allowing them to come closer and bond to each other almost as if they become friends.

As stated beforehand, the isolation truly hits Pi throughout the majority of the second part of his journey. On their way to Canada, the ship Pi and his family resided on got/became caught in a large storm. The ship flooded eventually, resulting in the ship and occupants submerged in the ocean. Pi watches this unfold from a small emergency/evacuation/escape boat. To expand on this, Pi is shown swimming against the waves in an attempt to avoid Richard Parker—thus noticing the ship descending underwater. During this scene, Lee films a medium shot of

Furthermore, his vast knowledge of animals, having grown up at a zoo, helps him to tame Richard Parker. Pi knows tigers’ psychological thinking and exploits this by classically conditioning Richard Parker. Likewise, Pi’s experience of watching a tiger kill a goat in his early childhood taught him the fundamental lesson that ‘an animal is an animal’, enabling him to strategically and mentally survive his long and testing time at sea. In addition to that, during the early parts of Part 2, Pi comes across a survival manual, a crucial object for his continued existence. The book gives him critical information on the do’s and don’ts of survival at sea and it is hard to imagine that Pi could have survived without this book which also gave him the opportunity to write down his words which were “all he has left’’.

He starts out with a zebra, hyena, an orangutan, and a tiger, but the animals slowly diminish leaving only Pi and Richard Parker. Pi works to tame and care for Richard Parker, and the two survive for two hundred twenty-seven days. Pi encounters a fellow French castaway who is eaten by Richard Parker (Martel 311-320). Pi also comes across a man-eating island (Martel 322-358). The events that take place are fairly far-fetched, and the probability of all of them occurring to the same person in the period of time given is even less believable. The second story, on the other hand, is a perhaps more believable retelling of the original story. Pi relates the second tale upon the request of his interviewers for “‘a story without animals’” (Martel 381). In this story the animals are replaced with human representatives including an injured Chinese sailor, a French cook, Pi’s mother, and Pi himself. The second story, like the first, begins with many passengers on the boat, but in the end it leaves only Pi to survive by himself after brutally murdering and eating the cook who killed both the sailor and Pi’s own mother (Martel 381-391). Unlike Pi’s first story, this account is dark, desperate, and harshly realistic, without any sense of hope to counter it all. After relating both of these stories to his interviewers, Pi asks them which story they think is better (Martel 398). Although the