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| Life of Pi |
The storyline revolves around a 16-year old Indian boy named Piscine
Molitor "Pi" Patel, who survives a shipwreck in which his family dies,
and is stranded in the
Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a
Bengal tiger named
Richard Parker.
Plot
A novelist has been advised to talk to Pi Patel, a middle-aged Indian immigrant from
Pondicherry living in
Montreal,
Quebec, who has an amazing story to tell. Patel tells the writer that the story “will make you believe in God.”
Pi's father named him Piscine Molitor after
a swimming pool in France. As a child he changed his name to "
Pi" (the mathematical symbol,
π)
because he was tired of being called "Pissing Patel". In flashback it
was seen that his family owned a zoo, and Pi took great interest in the
animals, especially a
Bengal tiger named
Richard Parker.
When Pi tries to feed the tiger in great curiosity, his father runs in
and angrily tells him that the tiger is dangerous and not like a human.
He forces Pi to witness the tiger killing a
goat to prove his point. Pi is raised
Hindu and
vegetarian, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to
Christianity and then
Islam,
and starts to follow all three religions as he "just wants to love
God." His mother supports his desire to grow, but his father, a
rationalist, tries to convert him to his own way of thinking ("think rationally").
When Pi is 16, his father decides to move the family to
Winnipeg,
Manitoba, where he intends to settle and sell the zoo animals. They book passage on a Japanese freighter named
Tzimtzum.
One night there is a storm; the ship begins to founder while Pi is on
deck. He tries to find his family, but a crew member throws him into a
lifeboat.
Just as the ship falls into the sea, a freed zebra leaps from the ship
to land on the boat with him. Pi then watches helplessly as the ship
sinks, killing his family and the crew. After the storm, Pi finds
himself in the lifeboat with the injured
zebra, and is joined by an
orangutan. A
spotted hyena
emerges from the tarp covering half of the boat. The hyena kills the
zebra and then the orangutan. Suddenly the tiger Richard Parker emerges
from under the tarp, killing the hyena. Richard Parker then takes
numerous swipes at Pi, practically running him off the boat; the tiger
then devours the bodies of the other animals at night.
Pi gets out biscuits, water rations, and a hand axe and builds a
small raft to stay at a safe distance from the tiger. Pi begins fishing
and is able to feed the tiger. He also collects rain water for both to
drink. When the tiger jumps off to hunt fish, at first Pi wants to let
it drown, then he relents and helps it climb back into the boat. At one
point, in a nighttime encounter with a breaching
whale,
Pi loses much of his supplies. After many days at sea, Pi trains the
tiger to accept him in the boat. He also realizes that caring for the
tiger is keeping him alive.
Weeks later and half dead, they reach a mysterious floating island of edible plants, supporting a
mangrove jungle, fresh water pools, and a large population of
meerkats.
Both Pi and Richard Parker eat and drink freely and regain strength.
But at night the island transforms into a hostile environment: the fresh
water turns acidic digesting all the dead fish that died in the pools,
Richard Parker returns to the lifeboat, the resident meerkats sleep in
the trees, the plants are carnivorous. Pi discovers the island's secrets
when he finds a human tooth. The next day, Pi and the tiger leave the
island.
The lifeboat eventually reaches the coast of
Mexico.
Pi is crushed that the tiger does not acknowledge him before
disappearing into the jungle. Pi is rescued and carried to a hospital,
weeping.
Insurance agents
for the Japanese freighter come to interview him. They do not believe
his story and ask what "really" happened. He tells a less fantastic
account of sharing the lifeboat with his mother, a Buddhist sailor with a
broken leg, and the cook. The cook kills the sailor in order to eat him
and use him as bait. In a later struggle, Pi's mother pushes him to
safety on a smaller raft, and the cook stabs her as she falls overboard.
Later, Pi returns, takes the knife and kills the cook.
In the present day, the novelist notes the parallels between the two
stories: the orangutan was Pi's mother, the zebra was the sailor, the
hyena was the cook, and Richard Parker, the tiger, was Pi himself. Pi
asks him which story the writer prefers, and the writer chooses the one
with the tiger because it "is the better story", to which Pi responds,
"Thank you. And so it goes with God". Glancing at a copy of the
insurance report, the writer sees the agents wrote that Pi somehow
survived 227 days at sea with a tiger: the insurance agents had also
chosen the more fantastic story.
