86 pages • 2 hours read
Yann MartelLife of Pi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 61-73Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Pacific Ocean”
Part 2, Chapters 61-73 Summary
Pi’s commitments to vegetarianism and pacifism erode with his increasing need to eat. Following yet another near-death encounter with Richard Parker, Pi is saved by a school of flying fish that are evading a dorado. Pi throws the fish to Richard Parker to tame him and kills the dorado to satiate his hunger. Pi thanks Lord Vishnu for “taking the form of a fish,” and reflects matter-of-factly on the ease with which he was able to bludgeon the dorado to death. As his sense of time erodes, Pi is ecstatic and beyond belief that his solar stills have produced drinkable water. Pi also lists other famous shipwreck survivors and calculates that he ends up surviving for 227 days. Key to his survival is his focus on daily routines, although his forgetting of time jumbles his memory.
Pi attempts to learn navigation through a survival manual, but he has no knowledge of spherical coordinates or constellations. He decides to let the winds and currents dictate his direction and focus on what he can control: his routines and mental state.
Pi’s willingness to kill and eat whatever is available becomes more pronounced. Pi butchers a sea turtle, eats crab, shrimp, and algae, and drinks fluid from barnacles. He also develops a training system for Richard Parker, allowing him to further encroach on Richard Parker’s territory using a turtle shell for protection. After being knocked in the water several times by Richard Parker, Pi finally manages to assert his dominance by inducing seasickness.
Later, Pi longs for a book of religious scripture or a good novel. He keeps a barely legible diary full of nothing but practical thoughts, solutions to problems, and observations about Richard Parker. There is no recognizable dating system or coherent sense of time.
Part 2, Chapters 61-73 Analysis
Life for Pi is becoming more monotonous and brutal. Pi used to shudder at the sound of snapping a banana open because it sounded like the breaking of an animal’s neck, but now he finds himself decapitating turtles to drink their “good, nutritious, salt-free” blood (200). Pi is cognizant of his descent into blind “savagery,” but he is less certain about his memory. He says of the taste of turtle blood, “It tasted warm and animal, if my memory is right” (201). In the context of a “new conceptual space,” or Lurian creation, Pi’s animalistic regression is logical. He appears as an early primitive creature who lives according to the “hunting and gathering” section of his survivor’s manual (196).
Pi’s failure of memory becomes more pronounced. Throughout Life of Pi, readers are asked to take a leap of faith, knowing that PI’s narrative is a hyperbolic truth at best. Martel achieves the blurring of fact and fiction through clever rhetorical strategies, but within the narrative itself, Pi’s memories steadily erode. Linked to this erosion of memory is Pi’s rejection of time. His recorded daily routine consists of praying, eating, sleeping, lifeboat inspections and maintenance, tending to Richard Parker, and journaling. The monotony of his regiment has the effect of obliterating his sense of time. According to Pi, however, he “survived because [he] made a point of forgetting” (191). His story starts on July 2nd, 1977 and ends on February 14th, 1978, “but in between there was no calendar” (191). Here, Pi deconstructs linear, secular time as a fallacy. Rather than sequential and homogenous, time appears as more cyclical or quantic in Pi’s narration.
That Pi’s daily routine consists of five prayer times mirrors Muslim prayer ritual consisting of five daily prayers: Fajr (dawn), Dhuhr (after midday), Asr (afternoon), Maghrib (after sunset), Isha (nighttime). Pi previously spoke with great affection about his Muslim prayer rug and its ornate designs which allowed him to feel physically and spiritually unified with his surroundings. Absorption in routine had the effect of etching in his memory the direction of the Kaaba (qibla). Pi’s sense of time and memory on the lifeboat, while severely fragmented, is nonetheless reoriented toward faith and God through repetition and ritual.
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