At dawn, Pi Patel sees the full violence of the storm he has been enduring: towering sheets of rain and waves that repeatedly break over him. Numb and dull-eyed, he clings to the rain catcher with one hand and to his raft with the other, doing nothing but waiting.

The weather shifts abruptly. The rain stops, the sky clears, and the ocean becomes calm and mirrorlike under a lone sun. Exhausted and barely grateful to be alive, Pi closes the rain catcher, wraps himself in a blanket, curls up to keep his body from touching water, and falls into a brief, deep sleep.

When Pi wakes in mid-morning heat, the vast, empty expanse of ocean overwhelms him. He sees how fragile his raft truly is, leaking through every crack, and how precariously the lifeboat itself rides the surface, like something that could be pulled under at any time.

Richard Parker then appears at the lifeboat’s edge and looks toward Pi, making the separation between them feel dangerously small despite the surrounding Pacific. Pi’s mind repeats “Plan Number Six” until he remembers it is a war of attrition: waiting passively, conserving resources, and letting time and nature decide.

Pi immediately rebukes himself for relying on that plan. He realizes Richard Parker’s current fear of the sea will not last if hunger and thirst grow, that the tiger can swim to Pi’s raft to take food, and that a Sundarbans tiger may even tolerate drinking saline water. Pi concludes that trying to outlast Richard Parker through waiting will lead to Pi’s death.