Man and the Natural World Quotes in Life of Pi

In anthropomorphism, people project human traits onto animals. In zoomorphism (that is one sassy word), animals treat another species like their own. Examples include: a dog who sees its owner's leg as a sexual partner, wolves raising abandoned children, and dolphins swimming with a castaway in the ocean. Certainly Richard Parker living with Pi on the boat counts as a surprising zoomorphic arrangement. But there's also the oddity of Pi's spiritual life: Pi the Hindu, Pi the Muslim, and Pi the Christian all inhabit one spiritual being. These strange bedfellows don't just tolerate one another – they achieve harmony.

Here, Pi is describing Orange Juice, the orang-utan who floats up to the lifeboat on a raft of bananas. Later, Pi will tell an alternate story of the shipwreck, one in which he more or less identifies Orange Juice as his mother. Therefore, Pi projects human traits onto an animal who is not really an animal but is actually his mother who has taken on, in Pi's imagination, the guise of an animal. There's enough interaction between man and the natural world to make a fellow dizzy.

Really, this is a heartbreaking moment in the novel. Ostensibly, Pi discusses (as he is prone to do) the stupidity of returning pets to the wild. How can the poor creature survive? But Pi also comments – and this is the heartbreaking part – on his own abandonment and the loss of his brother Ravi.