At various points, the book uses similes to show how Pi tries to distance himself from his grief through poetic language. When coping with the death of his family in Chapter 46, Pi tries to compare his family members to parts of a tree:

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing—I’m sorry, I would rather not go on.

At first, Pi connects his grief to extremely personal moments one would associate with family members. However, when he tries to twist these intimate insights into figurative language that is broader and more beautiful for his storytelling, he eventually finds the task too difficult. While he is able to change or spice up his story at times, his grief is one of the things he struggles to talk about or make a story out of. Beyond Pi's storytelling, this is evident with Pi in the modern day, when he laments that he can no longer remember his mother’s face and is private about his wife and children.

These similes emphasize how Life of Pi is an adult Pi’s constructed version of his childhood and time at sea—it isn't a straightforward retelling. These added moments of figurative language give insight into how adult Pi is still coping with these experiences. His inability to produce additional flowery language about the loss of his mother reflects how there are some things he can’t weave into a more compelling story. Pi takes his mother’s death the hardest, which is made obvious by his simile about her (he compares her to the sun that provides trees with the energy to live) and by his inability to expand more intimately on his memories of her. Likewise, his reconfiguration of his mother into Orange Juice in the animal version of the story also displays his struggle with confronting his grief, since the switch allows for some distance from seeing his mother killed and eaten.