Life of Pi sort of with a capital 'S' – something that would direct my life." He spoke of being lonely and needing direction in his life, and found that writing the novel met this need. The name of Martel's tiger, Richard Parker, was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838). In this book, Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship (and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger). The author also had in mind another occurrence
Dance of the Tiger Dance of the Tiger Dance of the Tiger (Swedish: "Den Svarta Tigern") is a novel by Swedish palaeontologist Björn Kurtén, published in 1978 and English translation in 1980. It is a prehistoric novel dealing with the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. A sequel, "Singletusk", published in 1982, continues the story of the family. Set 35,000 years ago in Scandinavia, during a thaw in the great Ice Age, the novel follows a Cro-Magnon named Tiger as he tries to defeat Shelk, a tyrant and a hybrid (Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon), the man who killed his father. With his family and much of his tribe