It shrinks rapidly and violently to two, and stays at that number for the rest of the trip, except for some fish and turtles the boy catches for food and bait. The population of the lifeboat at the start of the ordeal includes a swarm of flies, some cockroaches, a rat, a zebra with a broken leg, a female orangutan, and a hyena, besides tiger and boy. But apart from these structural details it is mainly memorable as a unique story of endurance and religious faith. It ends with a transcript of his conversation with two Japanese men, representatives of the company that owned the ship. It begins with a good thirty chapters about the boy’s background, including how he came to call himself Pi and what led him and his family to be on board a ship full of zoo animals bound from India to Canada that suddenly, for no apparent reason, sank in the Pacific. It spares us the suspense of wondering whether he survives by telling us up front that he lives to graduate from college, get married, father children and tell his story to a second narrator who cuts in briefly now and then.
Most of this book is a first-person account of a sixteen year-old Indian boy’s experience spending 227 days alone with a Bengal tiger in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean.
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