Life Of Pi Lifeboat Analysis

In The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a young boy is shipwrecked and left to survive on a lifeboat with a tiger. It’s there that he survives for a shocking 227 days. The longest that someone has survived on a boat was 173 days--a Korean sailor named Poon. That makes you wonder, just how did a sixteen year old boy survive for even longer than that? With a limited amount of food and water and (on top of those obstacles) a tiger for good measure? Is that even possible, and if so, what happened in his life to make it possible? Pi began believing three things in India that I believed helped him on the lifeboat and helps us to better understand who exactly Pi is: his belief in God, that animals and humans are alike, and that zoos are free and the wild

His belief was what kept him grounded in his time of despair and hopelessness, helping him to push through and continue to survive. While on the lifeboat while Pi did sometimes put his faith and beliefs on the backburner, he did always come back to them. Such as when his food began to run out he had to kill a fish. The first time he killed a fish he was in a state of hysteria. His emotions ran rampant, not only having to kill a living thing but eat it as well did not come easily to the vegetarian Pi. He said, “I was sixteen years old, a harmless boy, bookish and religious, and now I had blood on my hands. It’s a terrible burden to carry” (183). However, as time went on and the boy became more desperate, he killed easily and clinically, without hesitation and only thinking of his survival. He says, “I stuck finger into eyes, jammed hands into gills, crushed soft stomachs with knees, bit tails with my teeth--I did whatever necessary to hold a fish down until I could reach for the hatchet to chop its head off” (195). Even though at times Pi had to give up some of his beliefs to survive at the time, he never truly gave up. He always came back to