Life of Pi Yan, 'Life of Pi' is told from two alternating points of view, the main character Pi in a flashback and Yann Martel himself, who is the "visiting writer" (Martel 101) interviewing Pi many years after the tiger in the boat story. This technique of the intrusive narrator adds the documentary realism to the book, setting up, like a musical counter-point, the myth-making, unreliable narrator, Pi. The reader is left to ponder at the end whether Pi's story is an allegory of another set of parallel events. The novel is a work of fiction set in the summer of 1977 that
Life of Pi of the name, in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat. A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the "Francis Spaight" in 1846, described by author Jack London, and later the cabin boy (not Richard Parker) was cannibalized. Having read about these events, Yann Martel thought, "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something." Martel has mentioned that a book review he read of Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's 1981 novella "Max and the Cats"