Ishmael

Plot summary

Implicitly set in the early 1990s, Ishmael begins with a newspaper advertisement: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person". The nameless narrator and protagonist thus begins his story, telling how he first reacted to this ad with scorn because of the absurdity of "wanting to save the world", a notion he feels that he once naïvely embraced himself as an adolescent during the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Feeling he must discover the ad's publisher, he follows its address, surprisingly finding himself in a room with a live gorilla. On the wall is a sign with a double meaning: "With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?" Suddenly, the gorilla, calling himself Ishmael, begins communicating to the man telepathically. At first baffled by this, the man learns the story of how the gorilla came to be here and soon accepts Ishmael as his teacher, regularly returning to Ishmael's office. The novel continues from this point mainly as a dialogue between Ishmael and his new student.

Ishmael's life began in the African wilderness, though he was captured at a young age and has lived mostly in a zoo and a menagerie (before living permanently in a private residence), which caused Ishmael to start thinking about ideas that he never would have thought about in the wild, including self-awareness, human language and culture, and what he refers to as the subject he specifically teaches: "captivity". The narrator admits to Ishmael that he has a vague notion of living in some sort of cultural captivity and being lied to in some way by society, but he cannot articulate these feelings fully.

The man frequently visits Ishmael over the next several weeks, and Ishmael proceeds to use the Socratic method to deduce with the man what "origin story" and other "myths" modern civilization subscribes to. Before proceeding, Ishmael lays down some basic definitions for his student:

A story is an interrelation between the gods, humans, and the earth—with a beginning, middle, and end.

To enact is to behave in such a way to make a story (however true or not) come true.

A culture is a people who are enacting a story.

Reinterpretation of biblical stories

Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites and later adapted to work within Hebrew, Christian and Muslim belief structures. He proposes that Abel's extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites' losing in their conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden to humans simply to test humans' self-control. Instead, he proposes that eating of the Tree would not actually give humans divine knowledge but would only make humans believe they had been given it, and that the Tree represents the choice to bear the responsibility of deciding which species live and which die. This is a decision agricultural peoples (i.e. Takers) make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.

Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the belief that, once mankind usurps this responsibility—historically decided through natural ecology (i.e. food chains)—that humankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses.

Characters

Main characters

Ishmael is a gorilla, born in the 1930s, when he was captured from the West African wild and sent to an American zoo. After the zoo sold him to a menagerie, Walter Sokolow bought him and discovered that they could communicate telepathically. A few years after Sokolow died in 1985, Ishmael sets up an office and newspaper advertisements in search of pupils, with the help of Sokolow's daughter, in order to begin teaching the subject of "captivity". The narrator and Ishmael meet in 1991.

The narrator and protagonist is a middle-aged white American man who sought a teacher to show him how to save the world when he was younger, during the turbulent and idealistic 1960s. Now an adult, he finds Ishmael's ad looking for a pupil who wants to save the world. Intrigued because his childhood question may be answered, but skeptical because he has never found answers in the past, he goes and discovers this new teacher: Ishmael. The narrator never reveals his name in the novel, though it is revealed in the sequel My Ishmael to be Alan Lomax.

Unseen characters

Walter Sokolow is a wealthy European Jewish merchant who is mentioned only in Ishmael's back story but has died by the time of the main story. His family was killed in the Holocaust, during which Sokolow fled to the United States. While visiting a menagerie during World War Two, he came across a gorilla called Goliath (Ishmael's given alias at the menagerie). After figuring out that he and Ishmael could mentally speak to each other, Sokolow renamed the gorilla "Ishmael" and bought him from the zoo. The two studied a vast array of subjects together and, after his death in 1985, Sokolow's adult daughter Rachel funds Ishmael's upkeep, though she herself dies from AIDS in 1991.

References in popular culture

The opening credits for the 1999 film Instinct, starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr., indicate that it is inspired by Ishmael. Daniel Quinn did not approve of the script or movie before transferring the rights, which were transferred as part of the Turner Award, though he may have had some minor input on the script, though to a degree he personally considered trivial. The movie and book share no common story elements, and the philosophical connection to the book is reduced to some pictorial format and a few seconds of on-screen dialogue.

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam has cited the book as an influence on their album, Yield. Quinn responds to the album's significance in relation to the book on his website.

In Rise Against's album The Sufferer and The Witness, Ishmael is on the album notes' recommended reading list.

The song "The Taker Story" on Chicano Batman's 2017 album Freedom is Free describes the global colonization of the "Taker" societies based on the use of the term in Ishmael.

The name of progressive metal band Animals as Leaders was inspired by the book.

Chronology of events in the Ishmael trilogy

The following is a list of the (fictional) events in the interrelated time frame of Ishmael (published in 1992), The Story of B (1996), and My Ishmael (1997). Much of the chronology remains ambiguous in the former two, though is specified in much more detail in My Ishmael.

1930s: Ishmael is born in "equatorial West Africa", captured, and sent to live in a U.S. "zoo in some small northeastern city" for "several years"

Late 1930s: Ishmael lives in a traveling menagerie for "three or four years"

1939 or 1940: Ishmael is sold to Walter Sokolow, a wealthy European Jewish émigré and merchant in the U.S.

1955: Art "Artie" Owens is born Makiadi "Adi" Owona in the Belgian Congo (renamed Zaire in 1971)

c. 1950s: Charles Atterley is born in the U.S

1960s: Walter Sokolow marries Grace, who bears a single child, Rachel

25 February 1979: Julie Gerchak is born in the U.S.

Early 1980s: Art Owens studies in Belgium, becomes a dual citizen of Zaire and Belgium, travels to the U.S., and attends Cornell University, where he meets Rachel Sokolow, who is completing her master's degree in biology

c. 1980s: Charles Atterley becomes Ishmael's pupil

1985: Walter Sokolow dies and Ishmael begins living in a variety of new locations

1987: Art Owens returns to Zaire, leaving his U.S. investments with Rachel Sokolow