Pi's Life Boat

The Life of Pi, by Yaun Martel, is an adventure filled story about how an indian boy named Pi Patel spent seven months at sea with an adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Throughout the novel, Pi speaks about his life in the boat and the adventures that came as a result of his peculiar situation. He constantly has to struggle with the problem of living with the tiger on the boat, since the tiger could easily kill him. However, Pi intuitively manages to subdue the tiger and make his own life much safer. Pi Patel goes to extraordinary lengths to stay alive by effectively dealing with the danger of the tiger by making himself the alpha.

First, Pi subdues the tiger by marking out his territory. With the usage of his urine, Pi marks out an area of the lifeboat for himself and an area for the tiger. Since wild animals mark their territory with the usage of urine, Pi does the same on the boat to make sure that the tiger understands that Pi’s the alpha and that he’s in charge. Pi …show more content…
Whenever Richard Parker would try to enter Pi’s territory, Pi would immediately blow a whistle, drop the anchor, and therefore roll the boat, causing major nausea for the tiger. By using this psychological trick, Pi causes the tiger to remember excruciating nausea every time the whistle is blown, and thereupon retreat. “Treatment should be repeated until the association in the animal’s mind between the sound of the whistle and the feeling of intense, incapacitating nausea is fixed and totally unambiguous” (Martel 205). With this strategy Pi asserts his territory and authority and becomes the alpha male in the pair. This effectively destroys the potential threat of the tiger and makes life drastically safer for Pi. He shows himself to be confident in his abilities and creative enough to use his little materials to the fullest. Now the leader of the two, Pi can live in relative