Life of Pi - Keller Auditorium

Life of Pi on Broadway
NewYorkTheater

A very entertaining show about a teenage boy lost at sea for 227 days after the cargo ship he was on sank in a storm. The story he relates after his rescue is basically a hallucinogenic dream. The whole thing is fiction, so we have a kid in a made up story telling us his made up story, so, fiction within fiction, but it's a pretty great story.

The kid's story is that there was a tiger in the lifeboat with him. What actually happened (for a fictional version of actual) was pretty horrific, so you can understand how this experience could have deranged him. Anyway, the tiger's name was Richard Parker. Wikipedia gives us Martel's (the author) reasoning:

Richard Parker and shipwreck narratives

The name Richard Parker for the tiger was inspired by a character in Edgar Allan Poe's nautical adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Richard Parker is a mutineer who is stranded and eventually cannibalized on the hull of an overturned ship, and there is a dog aboard who is named Tiger. Martel also had another occurrence in mind in the famous legal case R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), where a shipwreck again results in the cannibalism of a cabin boy named Richard Parker, this time in a lifeboat. A third Richard Parker drowned in the sinking of the Francis Spaight in 1846, with a cabin boy cannibalized during an incident involving the same ship in 1835. "So many victimized Richard Parkers had to mean something", Martel suggested.