CHAPTER SUMMARIES AND NOTES

CHAPTER 76

Summary

Pi cleans up after Richard Parker’s bowel movements, which like Pi’s have become painful and infrequent due to inadequate diet. But the cleaning is more than zoo keeping to prevent disease. Pi explains that Richard Parker had hidden the feces indicating that the tiger wishes not to offend Pi. Richard Parker sees Pi as dominant. Pi uses the process of cleaning up as an act of “psychological bullying,” rolling the feces in his hand, sniffing it and staring. It is frightening, yet satisfying, for Pi to exert his dominance.

Notes

Pi needs to continuously assert himself as the super-alpha male, which is quite an expenditure of energy. He is having success in this, but his health, and Richard Parker’s, is declining.

CHAPTER 77

Summary

Pi restricts his own rations of biscuits as the survival supply diminishes. Always hungry, he now eats turtles and all parts of a fish, even the parts he would have previously used only for bait. He compares every morsel to the very best Indian cuisine. His mood changes with the degree of fullness of his stomach. He eats everything.

Pi tries eating Richard Parker’s feces. Having “abandoned the last vestiges of humanness” he catches the emerging ball in a cup and adds some water to it. He puts it into his mouth and finds that it is truly waste with no nutrients. He spits it out and feeds the remainder to the fish.

Pi’s health continues to decline.

Notes

Pi considers his wretched foodstuffs a menu of Indian dishes, even Richard Parker’s feces is “like a big ball of gulab jamon” (fried balls of dough and chopped nuts served with sugar syrup). He is in a starvation induced dreamy delirium. His physical and mental states are worsening.

CHAPTER 78

Summary

Pi describes the rich variations in the clouds, color, light, and rainfall of the sky. Then he describes the many sounds of the sea. Between the two are the winds, the moons, and all of the nights Pi spends drifting. He is living in an unchanging geometry of circles. The vista around him as far as he can see forms a circle. The sun is a loud, disturbing circle from which he wants to hide. The moon is a silent circle, tauntingly reminding Pi of his solitude. He wonders if there might be another “also trapped by geometry, also struggling with fear, rage, madness, hopelessness, apathy.”

There are opposing feelings associated with every circumstance. The sun is scorching and painful, yet it cures the strips of fish Pi hangs, and powers his solar stills. Night is relief from the blinding heat of day, but it is cold and frightening. When hot and dry he wishes to be wet. When it rains he nearly drowns. When he catches food he must gorge himself before it spoils. The rest of the time he starves. The hardest to cope with are the opposite, yet sometimes simultaneous feelings of boredom and terror. Thoughts of death are the only constants, and happiness comes from tiny, pathetic triumphs like finding a tiny dead fish.

Notes

There is irony in a boy named Pi describing circles, and like the mathematical pi, his journey is inexact and endless. He has no way of knowing if is he is getting anywhere or just going in circles. Even his spirit is cycling between hopefulness and despair. His musings about the possibility of another in his predicament foreshadows an actual meeting.

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