Pi's Lullaby

This song, also known as 'Pi's Lullaby' is the intro song to the movie Life of Pi.

"A child sleeps not because he is sleepy, but because he feels safe." -Ang Lee

The Theme

Although there are mmany themes in this book, the central theme is the will to live. No matter how civilized your life is, if you are thrown into a situation where your life is on the line, you will do anything to survive. Life of Pi is a story about struggling to survive through overwhelming odds. The shipwrecked inhabitants of the little lifeboat don’t comply to their fate; they actively fight against it. Pi is a vegetarian, but because he does not know how long he will be stuck on the boat, he leaves his vegetarianism and eats fish to sustain himself. Orange Juice, the peaceful orangutan, violently fights against the hyena. Even the severely wounded zebra battles to stay alive; his slow, painful struggle strongly illustrates the sheer strength of his life force. As Yann Martel makes clear in his novel, living creatures will often do extraordinary, unexpected, and sometimes heroic things to survive. They will also however do shameful and barbaric things if needed. The hyena’s betrayal and the blind Frenchman’s turn toward cannibalism show just how far creatures will go when faced with the possibility of death. At the end of the novel, when Pi raises the possibility that the fierce Richard Parker (the bengal tiger), is actually an aspect of his own personality, and that Pi himself is responsible for some of the horrific events he has narrated, the reader is forced to decide just what kinds of actions are acceptable in a life-or-death situation.

Characters

There are a variety of characters that make Life of Pi so effiective, some characters include:

Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi)- The protagonist of the story. He is the narrator for most of the novel, and lives at sea for seven months.

Richard Parker- The Royal Bengal tiger who Pi shares his life boat with.

The Author- The narrator of the Author's Note, who includes himself throughout the story many times.

Francis Adirubasamy- The elderly man who tells the author about Pi's story. He taught Pi to swim.

Ravi- Pi's older brother.

Santosh Patel- Pi's father. He teaches his sons to care for and control wild animals, but to also fear them.

Gita Patel- Pi's mother. She encourages Pi to be open minded with different books.

Meena Patel- Pi's wife.

Nikhil Patel (Nick)- Pi's son.

Usha Patel- Pi's youngest daughter. Shy but very close to her father.

The Summary

To summarize the Life of Pi, in the beginning, an anonymous author figure explains that he traveled from his home in Canada to India because he was feeling restless. While sipping coffee in a café in the town of Pondicherry, he met an elderly man named Francis Adirubasamy who offered to tell him a story fantastic enough to give him faith in God. This story is about Pi Patel. The author then shifts into the story, but not before telling his reader that the account will come across more naturally if he tells it in Pi’s own voice.

The story is broken up into three parts;

Part One is narrated in the first person by Pi. Pi narrates from an older age, looking back at his earlier life as a high school and college student in Toronto, then even further back to his boyhood in Pondicherry. He explains that he has suffered intensely and found alleviation in religion and zoology. He describes how Francis Adirubasamy, a close business associate of his father’s and a competitive swimming champion, taught him to swim and gave him his unusual name. Pi is named after the Piscine Molitor, a Parisian swimming club with two pools that Adirubasamy used to frequent. We, as readers, learn that Pi’s father once ran the Pondicherry Zoo, teaching Pi and his brother, Ravi, about the dangerous nature of animals by feeding a live goat to a tiger before their young eyes. Pi, brought up as a Hindu, discovers Christianity, then Islam, choosing to practice all three religions simultaneously. Motivated by India’s political strife, Pi’s parents decide to move the family to Canada; on June 21, 1977, they set sail in a cargo ship, along with a crew and many cages full of zoo creatures.

The ship is starting to sink at the beginning of Part Two. Pi clings to a lifeboat and encourages a tiger, Richard Parker, to join him. Then, realizing his mistake in bringing a wild animal aboard, Pi leaps into the ocean. Pi's family is gone. The storm dwindles and Pi considers his difficult situation. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and to Pi’s surprise, Richard Parker reveals himself- the tiger has been in the bottom of the lifeboat all along. Soon the tiger kills the hyena, and Pi and Richard Parker are alone together at sea. Pi lives on only canned water and filtered seawater, emergency rations, and freshly caught sea life. He also provides for the tiger, who he masters and trains. Temporary blindness brought on by dehydration, Pi has a run in with another blind outcast. The two discuss food and bond their boats to one another. When the blind man attacks Pi, intending to eat him, Richard Parker kills him. Not long after, the boat pulls up to a strange island of trees that grow directly out of vegetation, without any soil. Pi and Richard Parker stay there for a while, sleeping in their boat and exploring the island during the day. Pi discovers a huge colony of meerkats who sleep in the trees and freshwater ponds. One day, Pi finds human teeth in a tree’s fruit and comes to the conclusion that the island eats people. He and Richard Parker head back out to sea, finally washing ashore on a Mexican beach. Richard Parker runs off, and villagers take Pi to a hospital.

In Part Three, two officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport interview Pi about his time at sea, hoping to shed light on the wrecked ship. Pi tells the story, but it does not fully satisfy the skeptical men. He tells it again, this time replacing the animals with humans... a ravenous cook instead of a hyena, a sailor instead of a zebra, and his mother instead of the orangutan. The officials note that the two stories match and that the second is far likelier. In their final report, they commend Pi for living so long with an adult tiger.