RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

Life of Pi narrates the journey of a small Indian boy named Piscine, who re-names
himself and negotiates the space between three competing religious discourses of
Southern India: Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. He becomes shipwrecked while
immigrating with his family to Toronto, and finds himself stranded on a lifeboat of the
Japanese freighter Tsimtsum 1 with an injured zebra, a hungry hyena, an orangutan named
Orange Juice, and a tiger named Richard Parker. When all hope of Pi‘s return to Southern
India fails, and his death looms, Pi braves the tiger‘s lair under the tarpaulin cover on
which he rests to fill his water bottle with the bilge in the corner of the boat. He decides
to give up hope for a rescue by ―paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate‖
and gets to work on ―the business of survival‖ by taming and learning to co-inhabit the
life boat with the tiger (Martel 169-71). After Pi discovers a solar still, sets it up, and
works hard the remainder of the day fixing up the raft, he looks over the gunwale down
into the water:
I thought I was alone. The stillness in the air, the glory of the light, the feeling of
comparative safety—all had made me think so. . . . With just one glance I
discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me, all around, unsuspected by me,
were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine
traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of
plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were
madly racing about, no doubt honking and hollering at each other. (175)
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1 Pi‘s senior thesis for religious studies concerning ―certain aspects of the cosmogony
theory of Isaac Luria‖ (Martel 3) suggests an intriguing homonym from Kabbalah:
Tzimtzum, the first stage of God‘s creation of the cosmos when the creator hides his
infinite light from a world of seemingly finite creatures. Martel‘s Tsimtsum operates
analogously as the vehicle of Pi‘s shipwrecked removal from Pondicherry, removing Pi
from the light of his family, religion(s), and native home in Southern India (Elior).