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.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 2, Chapters 49-60Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Pacific Ocean”
Part 2, Chapters 49-60 Summary
Pi finds solace in Richard Parker’s presence. Because he feels his death is inevitable, Pi has nothing to lose. He compares his situation to that of a tennis challenger who, when faced with inevitable defeat against a champion, suddenly starts “playing like the devil” (135). Effectively, the odds are too stacked against Pi for him to even care. After finally catching a glimpse of Richard Parker’s full size in his “den” under the tarpaulin, Pi starts studying the details of the boat and calculating his rations (140). He compiles a list of emergency supplies found in a locker, which includes tin water cans, anti-seasickness tablets, vomit bags, parachute flares, a notebook, and “1 God” among other items (145-46).
Pi builds a raft connected to the lifeboat to create distance between himself and Richard Parker. As he is constructing his raft, Richard Parker kills the hyena. Upon fixing his gaze on Pi, Richard Parker is about to lunge, when a rat jumps on Pi’s head. Pi tosses the rodent to Richard Parker, who seems “satisfied with the offering” (153). Pi contemplates various foolhardy methods of solving the Richard Parker problem, but he concludes a “war of attrition” is his best option (158). Convinced that the “unforgiving laws of nature” will save him (160), Pi suddenly remembers that tigers can drink saline water, and Richard Parker would have no problem swimming out to Pi’s raft if compelled by hunger. Pi decides to tame Richard Parker instead, to assert his alpha status and co-exist with him.
Pi muses on fear and how reason, despite being “equipped with the latest weapons technology” (161), is no match for deep, visceral, crippling fear (161). Despite severe hunger and thirst, Pi occupies himself with improving his raft. He splashes his own urine over the tarpaulin to mark his territory and resists drinking the remainder of it, despite a strong temptation. After marveling at the cosmopolitan sea life beneath his raft, Pi awakes one night “half-moved, half-terrified” at the vastness of the universe. He ruminates on his suffering in a “grand setting” and realizes that his struggle is a “peephole” into the unknown (177).
Part 2, Chapters 49-60 Analysis
Pi realizes that fear is a powerful motivator. Instead of succumbing to fear, Pi harnesses it to his advantage. In some ways, Pi’s musings on fear resemble Emersonian ideas of Fate and Nature as endless, overlapping, and all-powerful, but not stifling of active human participation. Pi’s acceptance of death has the paradoxical effect of allowing him to discover personal agency. Like Fate, fear “shows no mercy” (161), but there is also no benefit to avoiding what Pi calls the “wordless darkness” (162). Pi’s newfound self-awareness completely changes his perspective.
That most religions consider death a natural process and an expression of God’s will is not a coincidence. The idea of death as transient liberation toward cosmic unity with God meshes well with Pi’s pantheistic beliefs, a concept we see again at the end of his list of rations and emergency supplies as “1 God” (146). Pi experiences several ecstatic epiphanies that resemble other literary classics, like Robinson Crusoe or the mystical Hayy ibn Yaqzan, which are about survival, scientific observation, and spiritual awakenings.
Pi’s proactive attitude is also bolstered by Richard Parker’s apparent receptiveness to Pi’s plan. Richard Parker starts communicating through prusten, or non-threatening feline vocalization. Effectively, this mutual openness reduces the boundary between Pi and Richard Parker. This contracting of space between humans and animals is a recurring theme of Life of Pi. This is not to say that social hierarchies within that contraction don’t exist. They certainly do, as evidenced by Pi’s manipulation of Richard Parker. As Pi channels his father’s gift of guessing safe territorial arrangements, or “flight distance,” Martel continues to blur material and spiritual boundaries.
Related Titles
By Yann Martel
