Robinson Crusoe influenced Life of Pi

Martel is writing inside the form Defoe invented and takes its conventions seriously enough to itemise them: the inventory of salvaged supplies, the daily log, the rationing of water, the improvised shelter, the slow acquisition of competence. The theological frame is Defoe's too, since Crusoe reads his survival as providence and Pi's whole book is an argument about which story about God you choose to believe. The graph already holds Max e os Felinos here, which is the specific source; this is the tradition it sits in.