Symbolism In Yann Martel's Life Of Pi

In the book 'Life of Pi' you find a young man, who grew up in a very religious world surrounded by animals of wisdom. The author goes into deep explanation of Pi's life, about how he grew up in a zoo and had a tough childhood. Pi develops a love for a higher power and starts to grasp the understanding of God, by learning three different religions. The religions were Islam,Christianity and Buddhism. After each of the teachers found that he was following multiple religions, each of them told him that he could only follow one. Pi continued to follow each of the religions and eventually studied zoology, shocker! Anyway in time soon Pi was on a boat with his parents journeying to Canada where the boat mystically crashed and began to sink. Pi escaped
At first Pi was telling Richard Parker to get to the boat which could easily be himself telling himself to get to the boat, when he has trouble reaching it he feels the need to give up and just when he was done with trying he is pulled up onto the life boat. After all how could have the tiger jumped onto the boat. The zebra represents a pattern mainly white and black which a sailor could easily represent. The sailor could have been dressed in white and the blood could have been represented by the black. Going on, once the hyena killed the monkey, the Bengal tiger then killed the Hyena. This could have been Pi enraging when the cook killed his mother. Once Pi killed the cook he was completely gone. I feel that Pi was just visioning a tiger and that is why the tiger never harmed him and rarely interacted with him. When Pi found the island I felt that he was simply not ready for real life and so he was drastically scared and so he thought he saw dead fish on the island, which caused him to only explore during the day. The island was considered toxic but no where on this planet has ever been recorded to have found an island so toxic and this 'island' was also never