Abstract
Summary This article tracks the spoor of the tiger within recent literary imagination before turning to the narrative coils in Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2003), where a young boy, Pi, is stranded on a lifeboat with Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. A tiger, as Margaret Attwood notes, “that burns bright... that glows with life-force, that roars and rips things apart”, “[a] tiger, that disappears without a trace into a jungle once land is reached leaving only a penned template behind”. In the course of this discussion I will examine Jacques Derrida's notion of “absolute hospitality” toward the other as well as the idea of animot as a benign form of othering. Coupled to Derrida's ideas will be those of René Girard's exposition of mimetic rivalry, the sacrificial victim, and scapegoating.
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