Life Of Pi Survival Essay

In the film Life Of Pi, Pi Patel’s adventure ends in a hospital bed where he is interviewed by two Japanese investigators about the shipwreck of the Japanese cargo ship. Pi tells them about how he survived with multiple animal companions in the lifeboat and his discovery of the carnivorous island. The Japanese men refused to believe his story simply because it is unrealistic. Pi then retells the shipwreck without the animals and instead puts himself as Richard Parker, his mother as the orangutan, the cook as the hyena, and the sailor as the zebra. In both accounts, Pi’s family, along with a number of their zoo animals travels in a Japanese cargo ship from India to Canada, in an effort to escape political upheaval in their native country. The
I feel like Pi made up the story of being in the company of Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger, because the experiences he had while being lost at sea were very traumatic to him. This was his way to cope with the ugly truth and to forget incidents such as seeing his mother die in front of his own eyes and killing the cook in a moment of self-preservation and revenge for his mother’s death. The tiger not coming out until the hyena began to attack Pi signifies that the tiger represents the cruel/animal side of Pi which was brought on by the atrocities of the cook that led him to kill a man. On the contrary, I prefer the version where Pi was in the company of Richard Parker because it is more interesting and less tragic and heartbreaking. The story was also full of amazing feasts that I really liked. Thinking that the only one who left Pi in that lifeboat was a tiger is essentially a happier story than the brutal one wherein his mother was killed by the cook and in revenge he killed the cook as well. The tiger story also blocks out the harsh reality of Pi’s life that’s why I like it