Life Of Pi

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Summary Life of Pi is the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, also known as Pi, who at the age of sixteen survived for 227 days on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean. Pi’s story begins with his childhood in Pondicherry Indian where his father is the owner of the Pondicherry Zoo. Pi is a deeply spiritual person who, by learning the teaching of Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism creates his own spiritual practice. Pi is deeply moved by science, inspired by his father, their family friend, as well as his biology teacher who is an atheist. In 1977, Pi’s family departs Pondicherry for Toronto to avoid the brewing civil unrest in India, taking many of the zoo animals with them aboard the Tsintsum, a Japanese cargo ship. The ship sinks, and Pi finds himself alone in the Pacific Ocean in a 26-foot lifeboat with a crippled zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a male Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. No one else survives. Some of the animals eat one another for survival and left is Pi and the tiger. The books setting is then set around the two’s journey on the sea and nearby islands. Finally, they reach Mexico and Richard Parker runs off into the woods and Pi is recovered by two men from a shipping company who own the boat that his family sank in. He tells them the story of his and the Bengali tiger’s survival on the lifeboat for 227 days but they do not believe it. So, Pi relates to them the same story except with his mother, a sailor with a broken leg, cannibalistic cook, with no animals and no magical islands this time around. The story closely parallels the first story without all of the fancy involved, and one of the men points this out. However, the two ignore the final story in favor of the
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