Life of Pi

Part 2 begins chaotically and suddenly with the sinking of the Tsimtsum. As he cries and laments the loss of his family, Pi spots a Bengal tiger drowning in the water, struggling to stay alive. The Bengal tiger is Richard Parker, and Pi frantically urges him to stay afloat. He throws Richard Parker a lifebuoy and reels him in to climb aboard the Tsimtsum. Upon realizing the danger of sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, Pi quickly throws himself overboard.

The narrative jumps back to just before the wreck when the Tsimtsum is four days out of a Pacific port in the Philippines. The sound of an explosion awakens Pi, and he tries to wake Ravi, but his brother is fast asleep. Pi scurries out onto the deck, where it is raining heavily. Pi realizes the ship has severe structural damage and hurries back to his family only to find an impassable flooded stairwell. After spotting several escaped animals, Pi finds three crewmen, but he can’t communicate with them because they only speak Chinese. They give him a life jacket and a whistle before tossing him overboard. Miraculously, Pi lands on a half-rolled tarpaulin 40 feet below the deck. The lifeboat that is half-attached to the tarpaulin sinks when a Grant’s zebra leaps onto it from the sinking ship.

The narrative moves forward to when Pi jumped overboard to evade Richard Parker. After climbing a lifebuoy to escape a shark swimming dangerously close, Pi spots the severely injured zebra and a hyena, but not Richard Parker. Pi wonders why he didn’t just succumb to death. He is alone on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean. Knowing that two alpha animals, the hyena and the tiger, cannot possibly co-exist in the same territory, Pi assumes Richard Parker has drowned. Soon, Pi spots a Bornean orangutan named Orange Juice who is floating on an island of bananas held together by a nylon net. The sea disperses the bananas, but Pi salvages the net and helps Orange Juice aboard the tarpaulin.

Pi uses the net to create a barrier between himself and the animals and waits to be rescued. The hyenas soon go into a frenzy and start shrieking and looking out into the water. Pi is scared of the hyenas and remembers his father’s advice not to anthropomorphize. Pi describes the hyena’s “catholicity of taste” and “accidental cannibalism” during feedings (117). After profuse vomiting, the hyenas calm down and lay in a small, restricted space behind the zebra, much to its anguish. Later, Pi realizes that the hyenas have bit off the zebra’s leg who, beyond teeth-grinding, is not exhibiting signs of pain. Pi marvels that the hyenas have not attacked Orange Juice. Later, the hyena again attacks the zebra, this time gnawing off large sections. Orange Juice tries to defend the zebra but is eventually overpowered and decapitated by the ravenous hyena. Pi watches, horrified, before spotting Richard Parker’s head. Pi falls asleep in a state of delirium.

We learn Richard Parker was brought to Pondicherry Zoo as a tiger cub. Richard Parker’s name derives from a clerical error when the Forest Department sent Pi’s father documents mistaking the hunter’s name for the cub’s.