As we embarked on the journey that is reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the character of Richard Parker really stuck out to me, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. He just seemed so familiar, and it finally hit me during our group discussion that I was thinking about a tiger that I had met in another novel, Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
(Picture courtesy of http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/oscar-effects-how-life-of-pi-caught-a-digital-tiger-by-the-tail/)
The Richard Parker of Arthur Gordon Pym is a sailor on the Grampus who joins a number of fellow crewmen in a mutiny. He is scarcely mentioned throughout the novel, though the reader becomes familiar with his gruesome fate. Once the ship capsizes due to inclement weather, the remaining few are left without sustenance. Parker suggests that they cannibalize one of their own in order to survive. They draw pieces of wood to decide who the unlucky one will be. Parker, unfortunately, draws the short one.
Martel’s Richard Parker is much more complex. In the novel, young Piscine Molitor Patel, Pi, is aboard a boat on his way to Canada when it sinks. The ship that they were traveling on was bringing the animals from their recently sold zoo to North America, and as a result, Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and Richard Parker, a tiger. Eventually, out of hunger, the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, but the previously hidden Parker kills and eats the hyena. The tiger and Pi eventually form a relationship that allows them to co-exist peacefully in the lifeboat. They share a wild adventure that culminates in the boat washing up onto a beach in Mexico and Richard Parker leaving Pi behind without a second glance.
The reason that these two characters are so closely related in my mind is that Pi gives a second account of his experience to the Japanese Ministry of Transport who is investigating the wreck that speaks to Arthur Gordon Pym in that it deals with human cannibalism. These officials do not believe that Pi’s unbelievable story is actually what took place, and so he offers them a second. He relates that he was not aboard the lifeboat with animals, but instead with the ship’s cook, a Taiwanese sailor with a broken leg, and his mother. He claims that the cook amputated the sailor’s leg for fishing bait, proceeded to kill the sailor and Pi’s mother for food, and then Pi himself kills the cook and eats him himself. The officials decide that the cook is the hyena, the orangutan is Pi’s mother, the zebra is the sailor, and Richard Parker is Pi. We are never told which story is true and which is a figment of Pi’s imagination.
In my research on the connection, I’ve found that Martel admits that the use of the name was inspired by Poe’s novel. Interestingly enough, I’ve also found that a few stories about shipwrecks mention individuals that go by the name Richard Parker and involve, you guessed it, cannibalism. The freaky part is that these events took place after Poe’s novel was published.
A little advice to all of the Richard Parker’s out there: stay away from boats.
A little more info about the other tales
