Chapters 37-46

Summary:

One night, Pi wakes up to a storm raging outside.  He steps outside full of excitement and the spirit of adventure, until he realizes the ship is tilting.  He goes back inside to see his family to find the inside of the ship is flooded and he cannot get to them.  The animals from the Pondicherry Zoo have somehow managed to get out of their cages and are running amok about the ship.  Pi finds crew members and tries to tell him of the problem but they do not speak English.  They toss him into a life boat and a zebra jumps into the boat after him.  As the Tsimtsum sinks, Pi sits alone in the lifeboat with no one but a zebra for company until he sees a familiar face.

(Bradford, Alina)

Pi begins to help Richard Parker onto the life boat until he realizes what he is doing.  He throws Richard a life buoy and begins to pull him in until he realizes what he is doing.  He attempts to force the adult Bengal tiger off the boat but it is no use.  He spends hours balanced on an oar sticking out of the boat.  As day breaks, Pi sees the zebra, badly injured and lying in the boat.  Richard Parker is nowhere to be found.  Suddenly, under the tarpaulin of the lifeboat, a head appeared.  It was that of a hyena.

("Hyena")

Pi comes to the conclusion that Richard Parker fell off the boat.  There was no way a hyena and a tiger could both exist in such a small space.

As the sun rose, an orangutan from the Pondicherry Zoo came floating on an island of bananas.  It was Orange Juice, the matriarch Borneo orangutan.  She came aboard the lifeboat as the pile of bananas held together by a net fell apart. Rather than saving the bananas, for some reason, Pi saves the net.

(Nagle, Maria)

Pi spends the day imagining what it will be like when a rescue boat comes and reunites him with his family.  When he brings himself to the present, he looks into the boat to see that the hyena has attacked the zebra which has somehow survived and Orange Juice appears to be very seasick.  Throughout the day, tension between Orange Juice and the hyena began to grow.  It peaked when the hyena attacked the zebra.  The result was a face off between the two animals where they screamed and made loud, aggressive noises at one another, but they did not fight.  As the sun was going down and the zebra died, he finally came to the realization that no boat was coming for him, and his family was gone.

Theme:

This far in the book, I am starting to see a theme develop.  When the sun rises after the first night in the lifeboat, Pi says "With the very first rays of light it came alive in me: hope.  As things emerged in outline and filled with colour, hope increased until it was like a song in my heart,  Oh, what it was to bask in it!  Things would work out yet.  The worst was over. I had survived the night." (Martel 119).  Hope is the only thing that allows Pi to keep fighting to get home.  The theme for this part of the book is:

Sometimes, when one are placed in a seemingly impossible situation, one must hold on to hope in order to survive.

Sources:

Bradford, Alina. "Zebra Facts." LiveScience. TechMedia Network, 17 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

"Hyena." Animals Encyclopedia. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Orlando: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

Nagle, Maria. "Miller Park Zoo Receives $700,000 State Grant." Pantagraph.com. Pantagraph.com, 17 June 2014. Web. 24 Mar. 2015.

"Reach Out For Hope by Stacey Thacker - Raising Generations Today." Embrace 2015. Raising Generations Today, 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.