Animals = Humans

As Martel has stated in one interview, he pushes his readers to make a leap of faith as the novel's events get more and more unlikely. (Check out the interview here.) We have to make a leap of faith—meaning, we have to take Pi for his word—in order to finish the novel without saying, "Oh, this must be Pi's imagination now," or "Martel's using allegory now."

That is, until Chapter 99, when we're given a far more plausible series of events:

[Mr. Okamoto:] "The blind Frenchman they met in the other lifeboat – didn't he admit to killing a man and a woman?"

[Mr. Chiba:] "Yes, he did."

[Mr. Okamoto:] "The cook killed the sailor and his mother."

[Mr. Chiba:] "Very impressive."

[Mr. Okamoto:] "His stories match."

[Mr. Chiba:] "So the Taiwanese sailor is the zebra, his mother is the orang-utan, the cook is...the hyena – which means he's the tiger!"

[Mr. Okamoto:] "Yes. The tiger killed the hyena – and the blind Frenchman – just as he killed the cook" (3.99.299-305).

Pi's fictionalization of his time in the lifeboat, after all, makes sense. He could have come up with whole Richard Parker story. He's a sixteen-year-old boy who experiences some very traumatic events—this is his way of coping. He invents animals for each survivor of the Tsimtsum.

Through Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba we get a very clear explanation of the possible allegory. Pi, because he kills the cook, imagines himself as a terrible and violent tiger. It makes his viciousness, his instinct for survival, at a safe distance. And the viciousness of the cook inhabits the hyena. Perhaps Pi can deal better with both the suffering of the Taiwanese sailor and the murder of his mother if he transforms these people into animals with human qualities.

However, Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba are by no means heroes in this novel. In fact, they're a little ridiculous. They're a bumbling Abbot and Costello who can't see the beauty and importance of Pi's original story and have to be led to faith. Or, if not faith, at least to a point where they admit that the story with the animals makes a better story.

There's a sense in which the first story is the truer story. For one, Martel spends a hundred and fifty pages on it—it's hardly a summary. It's the real deal fleshed out and made whole. Secondly, Martel more or less actually cautions against reading the book as an allegory in a number of interviews (like this Radio Praha interview, and this interview on YouTube).

But Martel, always a wily one, also says, "You decide which story is real." (Guardian Interview) Guess we'll never know.