Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Life of Pi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival
Religion and Faith
Storytelling
Boundaries
Summary
Analysis
One day Pi catches a hawksbill sea turtle. It is too large and unwieldy to deal with on the raft, so he has to pull it onto the tarpaulin of the lifeboat. Richard Parker growls but allows it. The survival manual had suggested that turtle blood was good to drink, so Pi goes about the gruesome and difficult business of butchering the turtle. He drinks all the turtle’s blood and throws the rest to Richard Parker. Pi decides that he needs to “carve out” more territory for himself and train Richard Parker to allow him on the lifeboat more often.
As Pi and Richard Parker move physically closer – with Pi deciding to live on the lifeboat more in case he should have to venture onto the tiger’s territory in rough weather – Martel emphasizes in another way that Pi becomes more animal-like in his constant quest for survival. He has quickly gone from weeping over a flying fish to drinking all the blood from a sea turtle.
Themes
