Pi Patel, the main character in Life of Pi, has a very open mind when it comes to religion, as he embraced three of them. This results in a unique Hindu-Christian-Muslim adolescent. The first ending deals with Pi surviving the journey with animals from his zoo. This open-minded outlook allows the reader to openly analyze the accounts that one reads. The second ending deals with other humans surviving the ship wreck for a time, along with Pi. Most readers, though questioning the accounts of the first story, tend to believe most of it; until they read the second ending. Once they read the second ending, they dismiss the first account because the story with the humans in it seems much more plausible. A boy could never have survived for so long all alone with a tiger. When you look back at both stories, there are many similarities and differences between each account.
             The animal account contains Pi, a tiger, a hyena, an orangutan, and a zebra with a broken leg, all surviving on a lifeboat. The human tale has Pi, a cook, Pi's mother, and a young sailor with a broken leg. The hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan. The cook kills the sailor and Pi's mother. Both stories take place over 227 days. "Very impressive. His stories match. So the Taiwanese sailor is the zebra, his mother is the orangutan; the cook is the... hyena."(311). Both of Pi's stories match one another very closely. Each person is represented by an animal in the first ending, and vice versa. The people, or animals, mirror one another in each story.
             Though there were many parallels to each story, there were numerous differences. In the animal story, there were "animals" on the lifeboat. A Frenchman is stranded on another lifeboat in the animal story. Pi and Richard Parker find an acidic island that they seek refuge on. "The smell of the vegetation was extraordinarily strong. As for it...