Isolation In Life Of Pi

227 days. 227 days of starvation and dehydration. 227 days of isolation and fear. 227 days of delirium and anguish. These things are only a fraction of what Pi experienced while stranded on the Pacific Ocean for 227 days. The Life of Pi is a Canadian adventure novel written by Yann Martel. The story is told in the perspective of the novel’s protagonist, Piscine Molitor Patel, known as Pi. In the novel, Pi recants his experiences of being lost at sea after being shipwrecked and alone with only himself, a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a 450 pound tiger named Richard Parker. Eventually, Pi and Richard Parker are the only occupants left on the tiny lifeboat and the two must coexist with one another for survival. At the end of the novel, Pi reveals

Repeatedly throughout the beginning of part two, Pi uses several negative connotations to describe the hyena. He calls it “ugly beyond redemption (Martel 248)” before going on to explain the animal’s typical traits. Pi narrates that “cannibalism is a common occurrence during the excitement of feeding [in hyenas]…it feels no disgust at this mistake. Hyenas will snack on the excrement of herbivores with clucks of pleasure…It’s an open question as to what hyenas won’t eat (Martel 250-251).” These distasteful traits are similar to the chef’s own. In the story without the animals, Pi tells of an incident on the lifeboat; “he ate flies. The cook, that is…we had food to last us for weeks; we had fishing gear…yet there he was, swinging his arms and catching flies and eating them greedily…he was a disgusting man (Martel 629).” This shows the correlation between the hyena and chef’s eagerness to eat anything, no matter what it is. Another characteristic the hyena and cook share is the cook’s willingness to cannibalize. Not even a second after the sailor died, the chef butchered his body and devoured it, even using some pieces as bait (Martel 636-637). He then later moved on to killing Pi’s mother and cannibalizing some parts of her body (Martel 641). Like the hyena, he felt no remorse or disgust for his