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Characters

Piscine Molitor Patel

"Pi" is the narrator and main character of the story. The story is told as a narrative when Pi is much older and living in Canada. He recounts the story of his life and thus the 227-day journey on a lifeboat when his boat sinks in the middle of the pacific ocean during a trek to winnipeg.

Richard Parker

Richard Parker is the Bengal tiger that is stranded on the lifeboat with Pi Patel when the ship sinks. Martel named the tiger after an Edgar Allan Poe character from his The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). The book tells of four shipwrecked men who, after many days privation, drew lots to decide who should be killed and eaten so the others could survive. Richard Parker, a mutinous sailor, drew the short straw and was eaten.

Tales of cannibalism by shipwrecked sailors were not uncommon in the 19th century. For instance, in December 1835, the ship Francis Spaight was wrecked in the north Atlantic. Some survivors of that wreck were known to have lived by cannibalism. In January 1846 a man named Richard Parker died when his ship, another Francis Spaight, sank.

In 1884, forty-six years after Poe's novel was published, a new shipwreck reflected many similarities with that story. After the sinking of their yacht Mignonette on the way to Australia, Captain Tom Dudley and three sailors were stranded in a dinghy in the Pacific Ocean. They believed they had no choice but to eat one of the party to survive. The victim was a 17 year old cabin boy named Richard Parker.^[5] A.W. Brian Simpson's book on the subject mentions the Francis Spaight and also, interestingly, refers to a boat called Tiger on which a youth was cannibalized in 1766. Having read about these events, Yann Martel said,