Ishmael - Chapters 1 and 2

I know I am catching up on blog posts, but at the same time, I want to illustrate well thought-out responses to Ishmael in the soon future! My initial impression of Daniel Quinn's novel, Ishmael, is that it grabbed my attention from the start. I am intrigued by the humanity of both the narrator, who remains anonymous, and the gorilla, Ishmael. I relate to the narrator from the start of the book. Like him I wanted to save the world when I was younger, lost hope, and am now searching for a reason to change the way I live for the better.

When the narrator goes to meet Ishmael, I found myself questioning descriptions of the room. The narrator states that he first noticed the emptiness of the room; He then reports the hideousness of Ishmael's face because of the similarity to our own. It is fascinating that out of all the animals, Quinn made the choice to use a gorilla, an animal we consider to be an ancestor of modern day human beings. Also, the narrator points out that we look at animals, even those which we are physically alike, are considered ugly, dangerous, and different from us. We are somehow segregated from Nature and the animals of the earth.

Opposite from the narrator's initial remarks, Ishmael elaborates another perspective. He states that the situation of the animals who are penned up is the same one that the narrator is in.
I specifically want to focus on a quote on page 35, "Even if you weren't personally captivated by the story, you were captive all the same, because the people around you made you a captive. You were like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede." I enjoyed reading this part of chapter 2 because Ishmael broadly pronounces the difference between being a captive of a story and being captivated by a story. Quinn also connects people to animals, which is an interesting literary statement. At the end of chapter 2, Ishmael asks the narrator about the one story everyone knows and accepts, aka an explanation of how things came to be. Like the narrator, I only have an impression of what our story is and don't see the full picture yet. Sometimes, I notice my own captivity. I realize that there are many social constructs in the world and that as Takers of the American dream, I think that our story begins with people who gathered food, and then gathered knowledge, and then decided to make something of it all. Without reading into chapter 3, I don't really know what our exact story is. All I know is that my societal purpose is to make a living, well whatever that means.