Characters

            The novel Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, is a book which questions the assumptions of our culture. The novel’s main character is a gorilla named Ishmael with human-like sentience who is able to communicate telepathically with human beings. With this ability Ishmael aims to educate humanity about the dangers of their unchecked growth and ethnocentric social values. Ishmael and the narrator cross paths due to this shared concern for the planet.

Ishmael serves as a Socratic educator for the narrator, encouraging the man to arrive at his own conclusions by telling stories and asking questions. The stories told do little to characterize Ishmael and the narrator, but are instead a boringly transparent method which Quinn employs to disguise his own criticisms of western culture. In fact, I believe that the narrator is purposefully characterized vaguely in order to make him more relatable to the reader. His borderline stupidity when asked even simple questions makes the reading experience more accessible to readers of many backgrounds. While this may be an earnest effort on Quinn’s part to reach more readers, frustration quickly takes hold after the first few hundred times the unidimensional narrator fails to understand the meaning of Ishmael’s lessons.

In one of the stories told by Ishmael, Quinn likens humanity’s “self-centered” perspective on evolution to the belief of a jellyfish that it is the masterpiece of creation. I would question the validity of this metaphor because the complexity of human intelligence provides a compelling argument in support of human-centric ideals. I would argue that it is the brevity of humanity’s existence which limits the development of a more complete perspective on evolution, not our arrogance as Quinn claims.

There are a number of other stories told in the novel which make me question Quinn’s extreme cynicism. While reading I often remind myself that although we as the reader are guided to make our own conclusions does not mean that they are our own – make no mistake, these are Quinn’s beliefs disguised by his slippery writing. And while I wholeheartedly agree with many of Quinn’s criticisms, his apparent misanthropy and hysterical environmentalism strike me as pessimistic – at least so far.