Pi notices Richard Parker has been rubbing his eyes and acting strangely. After Pi catches and divides a dorado, Richard Parker fails to see the fish thrown at him and must sniff to find it, convincing Pi the tiger has gone blind. With both of them reduced to skin and bones, Pi senses their end is near.

Soon Pi’s own eyes begin to sting, swell, ooze pus, and his vision collapses into darkness. Exhausted, starving, and nearly out of water because Richard Parker is drinking most of it, Pi decides he will die and apologizes to Richard Parker and to his family in a final prayer, entrusting himself to God.

In the blackness, Pi hears a voice asking if someone is there. Thinking it is madness, Pi answers, and the two talk obsessively about food; the voice’s carnivorous tastes and “accent” lead Pi to suspect, incorrectly, that Richard Parker is speaking. Pi then realizes the voice belongs to another person, and Pi shouts his name to prove he is real.

The stranger explains that he, too, is blind, and both men weep at the shared misery. Desperate for companionship, they try to row toward each other and finally manage to bump boats together and tether them with a rope. As Pi reaches out to embrace his “brother,” he hears Richard Parker growl.

The starving man attacks Pi, intending to eat him, and steps into Richard Parker’s space. Richard Parker instantly kills him, tearing flesh and breaking bones as the smell of blood fills the lifeboat. Pi recognizes the “terrible cost” of the tiger’s presence: Richard Parker has kept Pi alive, but at the price of taking another life, and Pi feels something inside him die permanently.