LITERATURE: Life of Pi – Character Changes

Chapter 78 has some fine writing and some nice insight into how our character of Pi has matured in face of the situation of survival.  While the previous chapter got into some fairly gross specifics of what he has come to find palatable for both himself and Richard Parker, it also gave us a good idea of his strategy in taming the tiger so that the two could successfully share this struggle. There is no doubt that Pi's experience as the son of a zookeeper comes in handy here; his knowledge of a wild animal's needs–and for that matter, one which was born into the much different aspects of living in a zoo environment–serve him well. You or I, on the other hand, would've long ago been eaten. But what was interesting is that rather than the animal adjusting to communicate, Pi's superior intellect allows him to accept that communication is more readily achieved on the animal's level.

But here's where there's some deeper digging into the experience:

Pi has told us that he was out at sea for I think, 272 days. He is sixteen years old. Yet he has adapted to being driven not by wants, but by needs, and is grateful and appreciative for what he surely would have scorned in his safer, earlier life. One would think that if 7 months adrift wouldn't leave one hopeless, nothing could. Yet we see this same human hope in times of war, in concentration camps, in prisons, in other times of what looks certain to be either unending strife, or death.

It is, I suppose, the human spirit. One wonders, however, to what length Richard Parker's instincts would have taken him; the same urge to survive, of course, but he has learned that he is better off not eating the last meal on board, Pi himself, as Pi has proven to be of value in providing him his needs.