Summary
The ship sinks, and Pi finds himself in a lifeboat in
the midst of utter chaos. He sees a Royal Bengal tiger named Richard
Parker in the water, near drowning, and urges him to save himself.
Richard Parker boards the lifeboat and suddenly Pi realizes the
danger in sharing a tiny space with a vicious animal. He throws
himself into the roiling water.
The narrative moves back a few moments to the point just
before the sinking of the Tsimtsum. Pi is sleeping
when a loud noise, perhaps an explosion, wakes him. He tries to
wake Ravi so they can go exploring together, but Ravi stays asleep.
Pi passes his parents' cabin door and climbs up to the main deck,
where he sees that it is raining. The boat is listing considerably
to one side and making awful groaning noises; Pi begins to feel
afraid. He tries to run back down to the level of the ship where
his family is, but the stairwell is full of water.
Pi goes back up to the main deck, where he hears animals
shrieking. Three Chinese crewmen put a life jacket on him and throw
him over the side of the ship. He falls forty feet through the air
before landing on a tarpaulin partially covering a lifeboat hanging
from the ship's side. A Grant's zebra jumps into the lifeboat after
him, smashing down onto a bench. The lifeboat falls into the water.
The narrative moves forward again to the moment just after
Pi jumps from the lifeboat into the water to escape Richard Parker.
A shark cuts through the water nearby and Pi is terrified. He looks
into the boat but sees only the zebra, not the tiger. He slips back
into the water but sees another shark and quickly hoists himself
up onto an oar hanging off the edge of the ship. He dangles a few
feet above the water, holding on for dear life.
The ship continues to sink until it disappears. There
are no other survivors, as far as Pi can tell. After some time passes,
Pi decides that he needs to change position to prevent further soreness
and help him spot other lifeboats. He climbs up onto the lifeboat's
tarpaulin cover, under which he believes Richard Parker is hiding.
Pi is frightened, expecting the tiger to appear and attack him at
any moment. But, the tiger stays hidden. Pi notices that the zebra
is still alive but has a severely broken back leg.
A hyena appears and Pi rationalizes that Richard Parker
must have drowned, for a tiger and hyena could not both be on the
lifeboat at the same time. Pi realizes that the crew members must
have thrown him into the lifeboat as bait for the hyena, hoping
to clear the lifeboat for themselves. Pi is fearful of the hyena
but decides that the upfront aggression of a dog is preferable to
the slyness and stealth of a jungle cat.
An orangutan named Orange Juice, once a star animal at
the Pondicherry Zoo and the mother of two male orangutans, floats
up to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas tangled up in a net. She
boards the lifeboat, seemingly in shock. Pi saves the net but the
bananas sink.
Analysis
Perhaps the strongest message of this section is the fierce,
unrelenting power with which life will fight to stave off death.
Again and again in the aftermath of the ship's sinking, we bear
witness to close calls and near-fatal incidents, and yet life continually
surprises us with its might and will power. Pi survives his forty-foot
fall through the air and lands unharmed on the lifeboat's spongy
tarpaulin cover. The zebra survives a much less graceful fall and
a broken leg. Richard Parker, in a state of shock and panic, swims
through turbulent ocean waters to clamber aboard a lifeboat. And
Orange Juice, having somehow evaded the ocean's gravity and the
suction of the sinking ship, magically appears out of nowhere to
join this group of survivors. In retrospect, Pi says, “Had I considered
my prospects in light of reason, I surely would have given up and
let go of the oar, hoping that I might drown before being eaten.”
But the sheer will to live outweighs logical thought, and so he
clings to the oar, and to life.
This vitality is drawn in stark contrast to the loss of
lives—both human and animal—that the Tsimtsum's sinking
caused. The appearance of Orange Juice is particularly moving, since
she is the most humanlike of all the creatures that manage to board
the lifeboat; her presence emphasizes the loss of human life. Moreover,
she is a maternal figure. Pi tells us that she gave birth to two
boys at the Pondicherry Zoo, and the parallel between Orange Juice
and Mrs. Patel (who also has two sons, Pi and Ravi) is striking.
Taken another way, Pi's untenable position could be interpreted as
the turning point in an adolescent boy's life, when he must navigate
the rough waters between the security of family life and the independence
of adulthood. Certainly there is a great deal of material in Part
One about the difficulty of growing up, the teasing from childhood
friends, and the existential questioning of early adolescence. Just
before the sinking of the Tsimtsum, Pi hesitates
and then walks past his parents' cabin door, a hint at his desire
to become independent. But the loss of his family leaves him inconsolable
and unsure of what to do. However, life goes on, with muscle aches
to match emotional pain, and he must figure out how to fend for
himself in a lonely, confusing, and even violent world.
