Life Of Pi Lifeboat Symbolism

Have you ever wondered what the animals on Pi’s lifeboat represent? In the adventure fantasy novel, Life of Pi, written by author Yann Martel, a Canadian author whose books had won numerous awards, tells a story of an Indian teenage boy, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, and his incredible 277 day journey in the Pacific after sinking of a Japanese cargo ship, Tsimtsum. Pi tells the story of his adventure, and also creates an alternative story which he tells the two Japanese investigators which substitute the animals with different people to make the story more believable. However, the animals on the lifeboat with Pi symbolize different person and different human natures. The three most significant symbolism in this book are of the animals are the

After the Taiwanese Sailor died, the cook appears another side of his face, evilness. While the corpse of the sailor disgusted everyone on the lifeboat in the second story, the cook suggested: ”Don’t be an idiot. We’ll use it as bait. That was the whole point.”(339) The cook wanted to use the sailors’ flesh as bait to fish and at this point he lost his humanity. The only thing left was viciousness, and which is just as same as a fierce animal, such as the hyena. Nonetheless, This is Hyenas’ natural instinct; “They eat their own kind (the rest of those whose ears and noses they gobbled own as appetizers) once they’re dead, after a period of aversion that lasts about one day.”（129） The hyena killed both zebra and orangutan and ate their flesh. He even pull Orange juice’s head off “Dumb with pain and horror, I watched as Orange Juice thumped the hyena ineffectually and pulled as its hair while her throat was being squeezed by its jaws ”(145)This shows his savageness but it seems to be reasonable when a hyena kills an animal because people think that killing is what hyenas do. People might only despise animals when they do something savagery, such as killing. But as soon as the hyena is transferred to a human, the cook, the ugly and intolerable actions seem to reveal the evilness and cruelness of