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Life Of Pi Lifeboat Essay

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As the menagerie of animals aboard Pi’s lifeboat is an unlikely combination, a valid way to interpret their appearance, whether they existed on the lifeboat or not, is to show that each of them represents a part of Pi during his struggle. The presence of each of the animals on the lifeboat is representative of Pi’s multi-faceted nature of his personality and way he must dissociate his actions and feelings from himself to survive. The zebra, orangutan, and hyena, all paralleled to human beings in the latter version of events, seem to represent values and tendencies that evolve through the course of Pi’s existence on the lifeboat. The zebra, a beautiful sailor in the other version of events, seems to represent Pi’s innocence and his inexperience with …show more content…

Just as the sailor and zebra fail to contribute with broken legs in the story, Pi’s innocence has no place in this situation and has to be abandoned nearly immediately by Pi. Wasting away while slowly being eaten and being doomed to die from the moment it jumped on the boat, parallels the fact that this part of his personality could never have any use, and the humanity of Pi was the only thing keeping it in place. The orangutan, also represented as Pi’s mother, could literally represent his mother or just the sense of comfort of his family, his home, and his previous life gave him. After falling to the hyena, this motherly and comfortable feeling was replaced by a frantic need to survive. The hyena, the most disgusting of the animals, kills both animals and seems to represent sociopathic tendency to sacrifice everything to have the best chance of survival, regardless of the effects on others or on the self. Richard Parker’s defeat of the hyena, a pitiful affair, comes after the hyena realizes it has done too much wrong to bear and must be brought back under the control of Pi. Richard Parker, unlike the other animals, has no direct counterpart in the alternate story, but he

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