ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the novels relation to its genre and considers the problematic line it treads between intertextuality and plagiarism. It concludes that Martel's shipwreck is an etiolated literary conceit, which renders the novel politically anodyne in relation to both its sources and the history of postcolonial migrancy. In a postcolonial world of forced migration and coerced travel, shipwrecks are common. Ferries sink regularly with massive loss of life, and countless boats carrying migrants along the economic currents towards Europe and Australia sink without trace. For thousands of individuals, the open boat is not a conceit. Martel's novel is as politically vacuous as it is superficial. The violence of our world political, economic, and racial means that many people are genuinely and literally adrift, not simply floating on a sea of text. The provenance of Richard Parker, reveals that Life of Pi is an inter-text that articulates the long history of maritime literature.
