Martel said in a 2002 interview with PBS that he was "looking for a story… that would direct my life".[12] He spoke of being lonely and needing direction in his life, and he found that writing the novel met this need.[13]
Richard Parker and shipwreck narratives
The name Richard Parker for the tiger was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship, and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger. Martel also had another occurrence in mind in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat.[14] A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the Francis Spaight in 1846, with a cabin boy cannibalized during an incident involving the same ship in 1835.[15] "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something", Martel suggested.[16][17]
Moacyr Scliar
Martel has mentioned that a book review of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's 1981 novella Max and the Cats accounts in part for his novel's premise. Scliar's story describes a Jewish German refugee crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a jaguar in his boat.[18][19] Scliar said that he was perplexed that Martel "used the idea without consulting or even informing me," and indicated that he was reviewing the situation before deciding whether to take any action in response.[20][21] After talking with Martel, Scliar elected not to pursue the matter.[22] A dedication to Scliar "for the spark of life" appears in the author's note of Life of Pi. Literary reviews have described the similarities as superficial between Life of Pi and Max and the Cats. Reviewer Peter Yan wrote: "Reading the two books side-by-side, one realizes how inadequate bald plot summaries are in conveying the unique imaginative impact of each book,"[23] and noted that Martel's distinctive narrative structure is not found in Scliar's novella. The themes of the books are also dissimilar, with Max and the Cats being a metaphor for Nazism.[24] In Life of Pi, 211 of 354 pages are devoted to Pi's experience in the lifeboat, compared to 17 of 99 pages in Max and the Cats depicting time spent in a lifeboat.[24]
