Martel said in an interview that the novel may have started that way, but he doesn't like to delineate truth and fiction. "What is truth and what is fiction? One must choose how one must interpret reality," he says. The truth is, he says anyway, that after the attempt at the novel failed, he recalled the man on the lifeboat with the panther. "And suddenly it came to me. Good chunks of the novel came to me whole. I was jubilant, talking to myself out loud."