The protagonist of the novel is a
sixteen year old boy, Piscine Molitor Patel alias Pi, the son of a zookeeper in
Pondicherry. The young
boy is interested in zoology as well as religion. He learns about three
religions; Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam and adopts all three of them as he
sees them all as paths to God. The story is set in the 1970s during Indira
Gandhi’s “emergency rule” in India. Pi’s family, speculating that the zoo might
be taken over by the government, decides to migrate to Canada and live off the
money they would get by selling their animals. Their ship capsizes on the way
to Canada. Pi manages to get into a lifeboat
and escape from the sinking ship. He is the only human survivor, accompanied by
some of their zoo animals; a Bengal tiger (Richard Parker), a zebra, a hyena,
and an orangutan. In matter of days, the only ones left are Pi and the tiger.
On the
face of it, this is a story of Pi’s survival for 227 days on the sea, with a
tiger in the lifeboat. (227? Would 314 have been cooler?) To keep distance from the hungry tiger, Pi creates a raft for
himself, using oars, a lifebuoy, and life jackets, and tethers the raft to the lifeboat. Staying in the raft
most of the time, Pi tries to assert himself as the alpha male against the
tiger, by using an emergency whistle and the tiger’s sea sickness to his
advantage. But, he is painfully aware that the threat from the hungry tiger is
still quite real. The
story tells us how Pi survives by cleverly using all his resources to procure
food and water, saving himself from sharks and a school of flying fishes,
suffering through ferocious storms, landing in the island of meerkats, coping
with the havoc that the sun and the salt water wreak on his body etc.. The
reader can empathize with Pi, as the author describes Pi’s gamut of emotions
from terror to loneliness to sadness to despair and ultimately hope and faith.
At the end of the novel, when a 40
year-old Pi tells the above story of his survival to Japanese investigators and
finds them incredulous, he tells them an alternate version, replacing the zebra,
hyena, orangutan and the tiger with a Taiwanese sailor, a wicked cook, his mother,
and Pi’s own alter ego respectively. The story with the humans is ghastly. Pi asks
the investigators which version they prefer, the one with the animals or the
one without? The question is profound because it underlines the deeper allegory
of this story.
One might say that Pi used animal parallels as a
defence mechanism to survive the harsh conditions at sea, while preserving his faith,
sanity, sense of morality. It was easier for him
to acknowledge the horrific acts by humans (including himself), if he
internalized them as actions of animals. One could interpret that his creation
of this ferocious tiger (in place of his alter ego) was to enable him to
survive. The alter ego enabled him to commit terrible and heinous acts of
survival, which would have been impossible for his own moral persona to perform.
They would be natural for a tiger. The raft in which Pi spent most of his time
can also be seen as a metaphor for his faith and belief in God, for it keeps
him alive, saving him from the tiger, his horrendous alter ego.
The book certainly makes you think
beyond what the words literally say. It leaves much to one’s own
interpretation.
