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 74-85Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Pacific Ocean”
Part 2, Chapters 74-85 Summary
Beyond prayer, Pi attempts to practice religious rituals, but his commitment to God is tested. As he has no sense of geographical coordinates, he cannot remember the direction of Mecca and forgets what Arabic he knew. He performs solitary Masses without priests and darshans without Hindu murtis while replacing the religious offering of prasad with turtle meat. While this comforts him, he feels immense suffering.
Richard Parker begins to recognize Pi’s alpha status when he starts hiding his feces. As part of a training routine, Pi picks up the feces and blows a whistle to assert his dominance, which makes Richard Parker nervous. Both Pi and Richard Parker suffer from constipation due to dehydration and a protein-heavy diet. Pi’s humanity and physical body begins to deteriorate. Faced with severe hunger, Pi attempts to eat Richard Parker’s feces, but he quickly spits it out, recognizing its lack of nutritional value.
Pi catches a four-foot mako shark and feeds him to Richard Parker, who accidently bites Pi. The accident is a reminder that, despite his power and grace, Richard Parker is not perfect. As Pi and Richard Parker continue to coexist, Pi finds himself wolfing down his meals in the same animalistic manner as Richard Parker. He is also aware that his tale is incredulous and that he cannot offer proof other than his own survival.
An enormous storm threatens to upend Pi’s lifeboat. Pi closes the tarpaulin over himself and Richard Parker to avoid being pummeled by the mountainous waves, but his raft is destroyed. He also manages to preserve his solar stills, but the boundary between Pi’s territory and Richard Parker’s is effectively gone. As he adapts to the mercy of Nature, Pi observes majestic whales and dolphins, whom he believes he can communicate with, but he rarely ever sees birds. One day, a masked booby lands on his boat. After killing it, he skins it and eats its organs, eyes, tongue, and brain.
Part 2, Chapters 74-85 Analysis
Pi ruminates on the many forms of the sky and other natural elements and feels he is “perpetually at the centre of a circle” (215). Furthermore, he is trapped between “boredom and terror” which he calls the “worst pair of opposites” (217). He is at a breaking point physically and morally and is only excited by death. Pi’s observations are deeply mystical in their recognition of multiplicity within oneness. This recognition is textbook pantheism, which views the universe as a divine emanation with a superior, transcendent God. The substances of the natural world are multiple, but they are interconnected and identical to God. Pi’s suffering is situated within this conception of a reflective, circle-like cosmos, in which his “gaze is always a radius” and no matter how turbulent and dynamic the environment, “the geometry never changes” (215-16). In religious thought, suffering is conceived as spiritual growth or a display of compassion, such as Jesus’s sacrifice.
The conceptual boundaries between human and animal further contract with Pi’s animalistic eating habits that mirror Richard Parker’s, as well as Pi’s delusional efforts to communicate with sea creatures. As in Moby Dick, whales can represent celestial beings. Further, Pi describes the albatross as a “supernatural and incomprehensible” creature. Pi is effectively attempting to communicate with the divine. Within these moments, slivers of Pi’s humanity reappear, such as when he laments whale hunting as a “heinous crime” (230).
Amidst his ordeal, Pi recognizes certain events as a sign of God, such as the lightning bolts during a near-ruinous thunderstorm. He says of this strike of lighting, “Everything was either pure white light or pure black shadow. The light did not seem to illuminate as much as penetrate” (233). The Manichean (a religion that emphasizes dualism) white-black contrast parallels his being trapped between boredom and terror, while the penetrating light represents a pantheistic permeation of God’s essence.
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