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
The Eyes of the Tiger style. However, since at least 1973, later editions of this novel were rewritten in first-person narrative style. The story is set in September 1965. Carter is in Geneva, Switzerland on Mission Tiger – a plan to steal a large gold and ruby statue of a tiger from Hermann Göring’s private Swiss bank vault. Former SS General Max Rader and Imperial Japanese Army Colonel Shikoku Hondo are also on their way to steal the tiger. The vault has been locked using a French key – a device that requires two matching key components to be inserted together – one half of