Richard Parker stares at the boy. He’s hungry. He growls. His stomach makes a similar sound. The boy blows a whistle. The ear-splitting noise annoys Richard Parker. He crouches to attack, to leap, to stop the whistle, to rid the lifeboat of this unwanted company, to have dinner. God’s hand reaches out. The tiger stays. In Life of Pi, Martel develops the character of Pi through his 227 unbelievable days on a lifeboat, taking leaps of faith to transform his experience from a dark disaster to a story that will “make you believe in God.”

Despite the draining effect of endless weeks on the lifeboat, Pi attempts to comfort himself through his faith. He names everything he can see as of God, his clothes, his “hat,” Richard Parker, the lifeboat, the sea, and the sky. The lifeboat he calls God’s ark, but towards the end of the short chapter Pi admits his despair in that “…God’s hat was always unraveling, God’s pants were falling apart. God’s cat was a constant danger. God’s ark was a jail. God’s wide acres were slowly killing me. God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening” (209). Even the optimism Pi endeavors to maintain crumbles as he suffers from the despair that “was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond comparison” (209). Faith in God consoles and strengthens Pi at times, but his hopeless surroundings weaken him again until what were once God’s acres transform into the very thing causing Pi’s slow death. The blackness always passes and despite the waning hope, “God would remain, a shining point o flight in my heart. I would go on loving” (209).

God’s cat, though a “constant danger,” is nevertheless a constant companion to Pi. When Pi notices that Richard Parker remains on the lifeboat, he “lost all hope,” and “as a result I perked up and felt much better… I was so obviously outmatched by Richard Parker that it wasn’t even worth worrying about” (135). The presence of the hyena frightens Pi but does not kill all hope; surviving in the presence of a tiger, however, is so ridiculously preposterous that Pi accepts that he will die soon. This realization frees him to worry about food and water, instead of Richard Parker. Pi later decides to tame and train the tiger and acknowledges in recounting his story that Richard Parker “pushed me to go on living. I hated him for it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today” (164). Pi takes advantage of sharing the “jail” with Richard Parker to train him, using the knowledge as a zookeeper’s son, his thirst for survival, and his hope for the reward of life. His longing to live outweighs all else; if not stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of an ocean with the tiger, attempting to train him with a whistle and a turtle shell as a sole defense would have never crossed his mind. The idea of training a tiger in such a way is absurd, but for Pi remains his only hope. He clings to it.

When faith begins to fade and Pi’s physical weakness intensifies, the lifeboat approaches a “chlorophyll heaven” (258). Pi explores the island, eat, drinks, and his strength restores, so that “Put simply, I returned to life” (269). Pi’s glee at the island and the abundant food evaporates upon discovering the tree containing human teeth and the acidic water at night. He understands then that the island “was carnivorous” (281). Pi decides to flee the island, preferring “to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island” (283). The island symbolizes Pi’s hopelessness; although its presence cures him physically, it begins to slowly kill him spiritually, destroying any remaining hope for rescue, for salvation.

The carnivorous island produces the most doubt in the Japanese men to whom Pi first relates his story. The setting of the island and the presence of the tiger seem “hard to believe” and laughable even to Okamoto and Chiba. Pi responds with “Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” (297). Pi resolves that they want a story “that won’t surprise you… a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality” (302). Pi gives them what they request.

Towards the beginning, Pi speaks of his annoyance with agnostics. He acknowledges that “doubt is useful for a while,” but that “we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation” (28). Later on in the novel Pi imagines the death of an agnostic compared to that of an atheist and how the latter would take a “leap of faith” but the former would simply “stay beholden to dry, yeastless factuality” and “miss the better story” (64). The same holds true for life as for religion. As Pi says to the Chiba and Okamoto, love, life, and God are all “hard to believe,” and thus would require a leap of faith. The Japanese men, lacking such imagination, wanting the dry, yeastless factuality, cannot take the leap of faith to accept what strikes them as hard to believe. Only when they hear what they want do they accept the hard-to-believe story as the “better story” (317).

Martel, like the character of Pi, believes that life “is how we understand it,” that stories should be more than “dry, yeastless factuality,” that life can be interpreted in different ways, that two different stories can have the same meaning (302). Just as Pi tells his story in two ways, the “better story” and the “dry, yeastless factuality,” everything contains more than one story, one interpretation, simply one “right” way to tell. The lifeboat and his experience on it affect him the same in the animal story as in the human story. The algae island really does exist, just in a more abstract way than in Pi’s original tale, the hopelessness of rescue. Richard Parker truly does inhabit the lifeboat, just not in the way that Chiba and Okamoto understand, as Pi imagines himself as the tiger to lessen the intensity of killing a man, the cook. Pi tells the men the truth, just not in the way they expect. Though they do not fully believe the story, in the end they accept it as the truth; they even praise Pi for surviving so long at sea, despite sharing a lifeboat for 227 days with an adult Bengal tiger.