Richard Parker coincidences

Magical Realist

Valued Senior Member
"Richard Parker is the name of several people in real life and fiction who became shipwrecked, with some of them subsequently being cannibalised by their fellow seamen:

In Edgar Allan Poe's only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, Richard Parker is a mutinous sailor on the whaling ship Grampus. After the ship capsizes in a storm, he and three other survivors draw lots upon Parker's suggestion to kill one of them to sustain the others. Parker then gets cannibalized.

In 1846, the Francis Spaight foundered at sea. Apprentice Richard Parker was among the twenty-one drowning victims of that incident, though there were no cases of cannibalism.[1][2]

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank. Four people survived and drifted in a life boat before one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, was killed by the others for food. This led to the R v Dudley and Stephens criminal case.[3][4]

Another Richard Parker was involved in the Spithead and Nore mutinies in 1797 and subsequently hanged, but not eaten.[5]

Writer Yann Martel included Richard Parker as both a tiger hunter and a Bengal tiger in his 2001 novel Life of Pi. In the novel, the tiger is set adrift in a lifeboat after a shipwreck with three other animals and a boy, the protagonist. It eats the other animals but not the boy."

life-pi-richard-parker-Suraj-Sharma.jpg
 
The most likely and scientific explanation for this is that they're all the same person, both reincarnated in the flesh and as inspiration in the minds of the creative.

That's what the evidence suggests, anyway.
 
Dang! Literature predicting the future. Maybe someone will build a nuclear submarine and name it "Nautilus".
 
"Richard Parker is the name of several people in real life and fiction who became shipwrecked, with some of them subsequently being cannibalised by their fellow seamen:

Also Spiderman's father. That Richard Parker was in a plane crash rather than a shipwreck. No cannibalism of the roasted bodies of the secret agents afterwards (Peter's mother was with RP -- both worked for S.H.I.E.L.D.). Writer Stan Lee occasionally forgot Peter Parker's last name in the earliest comic stories (calling him Peter Palmer). Likewise, probably no special reason for why he chose "Richard" as Peter's dad by 1968, such as later encountering the name via either the Poe story or the real-life cabin boy incident. (He surely couldn't have resisted killing Spiderman's parents in similar fashion if there was a connection).
 
I think that literature predicting future is a normal phenomenon if we view it from the perspective of the mass consciousness. It has already been proved that conscious and unconscious processes might have significant effects on the events in the material world. In other words, a famous name might have influence on somebody's destiny because it was 'programmed' in a literary work. When somebody see a boy named Richard Parker, they think: "Oh, Richard Parker, exactly like the one who became shipwrecked". In this way, people might program the boy without even knowing or understanding it.
Sure, it's only a theory, only one of numerous theories which might explain this interesting phenomenon.
 
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