In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) and Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011), the violation of a taboo is not simply the centre or the climax of the story, but rather, the entire story is told exactly because of an incomprehensible and indigestible event. Both novels are contemporary representatives of nautical fiction, telling an ordeal at sea with the protagonist eventually resorting to cannibalism. The two main characters consume a best friend and a brother respectively, but as a result of their transgressive act, the representational ethics of taking a dead man’s place in order to survive organises the narrative pattern of both books. I aim to explore how the thematic element of cannibalism affects the narrative structures of these texts. Cannibalism creates a fictitious, out-of-time, liminal space around itself during the tensest scenes: the chapters recounting the tragic incident mark where the whole narrative blooms from, bearing a resemblance to the navel metaphor Sigmund Freud uses to describe the point of origin in every dream.