Poetry In Life of Pi

Though the poetry in never directly mentioned in Life of Pi, many similarities can be drawn between the way in which Pi depicts his 227 ordeal on the life raft with that of an epic poem. In the first version of Pi's adventure at sea, which accounts for a majority of the book, Pi creates an alternate reality in which he replaces humans with animals that exhibit the same characteristics as those who actually were present on the raft.
The animals that Pi supposedly is trapped on the life raft with include a zebra, hyena, an orangutan, and a full grown tiger. These animals however are not present and instead are metaphors for people that were on the raft. The zebra represents a sailor who breaks his leg falling to the life boat, and like the zebra he ends up dying. The orangutan represents Pi’s mother who like the zebra ends up dying at the hands of the hyena. The hyena is a metaphor for the brutal psychotic cook that takes refuge on the raft. He is responsible for the deaths of the sailor, who he intends to use as food, and Pi’s mother, who gets in his way. Pi is the tiger in his story yet speaks as if they are separate. It is he who kills the cook and the tiger who kills the hyena.