Daniel Quinn's Ishmael

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is an eye opening book that begins with the life story of a gorilla who has lost the sense of who he is until he is questioned about by a man who visits him at a zoo. Walter Sokolow, a man who visits him and declares he is not this “Goliath” everyone is calling him out to be renamed the gorilla, Ishmael and by doing so gives Ishmael the recognition he needed to believe that he himself is an individual person. As he is a captive trapped in a zoo, he realizes that humans are also living in a world that is trapped. He builds up a student and teacher relationship with the narrator in which he himself is completely unbiased. Ishmael as a teacher gives the knowledge of what he builds up as he was in captivity and explains

The author uses Mother Culture as a prophet of sorts that they look up too, because without her they would be lost and confused. Humans have followed a set of three laws which the narrator explains are; do not murder your rivals in order to gain food, do not terminate your rivals food supply in order to develop your own food supply and do not refuse entry for people to acquire food. If without the laws she had set up would not be followed, the world that humans have lived on for years would decline as a whole. The story of Adam and Eve is one of the biblical references the author uses to justify how the Gods set up a way of life for humans to live. They are not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil because it is banned according to the bible. Any biblical story has had no reason as to why it is banned but Ishmael gives a reason as to why this is so. The forbiddenness came from keeping any knowledge known to the Gods from ever going into the hands of humans, to keep a balance of humans from the

On the hand of the Leavers, they are traditional people who follow what generations and generations have done before them and their knowledge gets passed down. However Takers push away old ways and make way for new ways which is described as cultural amnesia. Takers are a culture who repress memories, fail to remember or renounce things that came from their