There’s something terribly thrilling about a character stranded in a lifeboat, adrift on the perpetual sea. It’s a simple device, yet it contains the potential for all manner of tragedies and comedies, and so often with a necessarily limited number of characters to play out the action. Inside of these stories, the paltry refuge of a lifeboat becomes a metaphor for the world at large, and the characters within tend to serve as archetypes of our basest motives. The idea present in nearly all of these stories is simple: only when we are faced with our own mortality can we come to truly know ourselves. While this notion isn’t unique to the “lifeboat” story, it is rarely depicted with such purity. In Life of Pi, this conceit bears up most of the film, pitting the titular Pi against a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, as they cling to life and hope, and to each other.
Peter Wertz
Wertz of Wisdom 