Summary
Pi tells the story of Richard Parker's capture. A panther
had been killing people near Bangladesh, and a professional hunter
was called in to try to capture it. Leaving a goat as bait, the
hunter instead attracted two tigers, a mother and her cub. The hunter sedated
the mother and picked up the cub, sending them both off to the Pondicherry
Zoo. In the accompanying paperwork, the name of the hunter who had
picked up the cub, Richard Parker, gets mixed up with the name of
the cub, Thirsty. The mix-up so amuses Mr. Patel that he decides
to call the tiger cub Richard Parker.
Back on the lifeboat, Pi is so certain the tiger will
kill him that he actually cheers up a bit. There's nothing he can
do now. Suddenly he is overcome by thirst and explores the lifeboat
looking for water. He observes the details of the boat: its benches
and oarlocks, its bright orange color, its dimensions—twenty-six
feet long and eight feet wide. Pi discovers a locker containing
emergency supplies under the end of the lifeboat under the tarpaulin,
where Richard Parker has his “den.” Carefully, he opens the locker
and assesses the contents, greedily drinking some canned water and
eagerly eating emergency rations. He tallies his supplies: he has 31 cartons
of rations and 124 cans of water, among other
survival items.
Pi decides that to survive with Richard Parker as a companion
he needs to build a raft to put some distance between himself and
the tiger. He creates a raft using oars, a lifebuoy, and life jackets,
then tethers it to the lifeboat. As he is doing so, the hyena starts
whining and Richard Parker begins to growl. The tiger kills the
hyena, who dies without a whimper. Richard Parker turns around and
starts to approach Pi but gets distracted by the rolling of the
boat and the bounciness of the tarpaulin. At that moment, a rat
appears and runs up onto Pi's head. Pi grabs and throws the rat
at Richard Parker, who devours it, giving Pi just enough time to
escape into his raft.
The raft proves seaworthy, but Pi knows he is floating
just above a vast ocean, with sharks all around. Rain falls and
Pi uses a rain catcher to trap fresh water for drinking. He continually
checks the knots in the ropes holding together the parts of the
raft. Unable to sleep, he entertains fanciful ways of killing Richard
Parker. Finally Pi decides to wait for the tiger to run out of water
and starve. The next day he realizes the flaws in his plan: Bengal
tigers can swim and drink saline water. If Richard Parker gets hungry,
he will jump into the ocean and swim out to Pi. If he gets thirsty,
he will drink seawater.
For now, though, Richard Parker is sated, having drunk
rainwater and feasted on the hyena. While looking at Pi, he makes
an unusual noise that sounds like prusten. Pi recognizes
it as the rare sound tigers use to express harmless intentions.
At this moment, Pi decides to try to tame Richard Parker. He uses
a whistle on one of the lifejackets as a whip and shouts across
the water to prove his alpha status. Richard Parker intensely dislikes
the sound of the whistle and lies down in the bottom of the lifeboat.
Analysis
Fear takes numerous forms in the text, but its very omnipresence eventually
reduces its power over Pi. As a narrator, Pi is terribly self-aware,
and he recognizes and even catalogs some of the gradations of anxiety
he feels from minute to minute: the blind terror he feels when he
jumps into the ocean only to see a shark fin slice through the water;
the defensive panic that comes from facing down a carnivorous, hungry
hyena; his dread over his family's fate. Pi's enormous and all-encompassing
fear of Richard Parker has an odd expression: it makes him feel
a little better. With Richard Parker aboard the boat, death is inevitable,
not just a possibility. Because of this fact, Pi can stop worrying
about what might happen; he can instead be comforted by knowing
what will happen, regardless of how horrible that fate is. Accepting
his own death makes his fear less paralyzing and enables him to
take action.
Pi's fear is tempered somewhat by Richard Parker's unexpected and
welcome snort of prusten, a tiger's way of stating
that his intentions are benevolent. Rather than demonstrating his
pure animalistic brute strength, Richard Parker does a quasi-human
thing: he indicates a willingness to negotiate. This occurrence
more than any other equips Pi with the courage to begin training
the tiger. While Pi's early inclination is to run as far away from
Richard Parker as he can—as far as the lifeline between the lifeboat
and raft will allow—the tiger's affable snort brings him back. He
begins to reconsider boarding the lifeboat and not confining himself
to his raft.
This movement of Pi and Richard Parker toward one another,
the literal lessening of physical distance, underscores a message
that Martel will amplify over the course of the novel: animals and humans
aren't such different creatures after all. Earlier in the novel Pi
says that omega animals (such as Richard Parker) will often be obedient
to a human trainer in an effort to climb up the social hierarchy,
tolerating what they perceive as the human alpha creature's odd
demands. In essence, they mimic human behavior in the same way that
Pi, out of respect for Richard Parker, mimics the tiger. It is significant,
too, that the tiger bears a man's name, while Pi could be a shortened
form of the word pisces, or fish.
Martel has built zoomorphic ambiguity right into their names, pointing
out quite strongly the gray area between humanity and animal nature.
