Ishmael Chapters Summary And Analysis

Chapter One

The book starts off with the narrator questioning the seriousness of an ad he saw mentioning the desire to save the world. Later, he decides to give the office a visit and was expecting a long line of diverse people.

When he first enters the room, he was shocked to see that nobody had showed up. However, there was another creature in the room that was a gorilla. The creature was Ishmael. They interacted through an unusual form of telepathy. Ishmael told the narrator that he was the teacher. Then, he told his story about his past experiences with people and captivity. He started processing human actions when he was in a zoo. He was then sold to a traveling menagerie. While he was there he began noticing differences in the ways that people were interacting with him. Ishmael was able to determine that he was called Goliath. One day, an old man walked by and said, “you are not Goliath.” This statement caused Ishmael to ask himself, “ if I'm not Goliath, then who am I?”

The stranger, who was later identified as Mr. Sokolow, told Ishmael that he was not Goliath, only given the name. Mr. Sokolow helped Ishmael find his first real identity and took him in and started to educate him. Unfortunately, there was a barrier and Ishmael was not able to learn as well as they had hoped. Over time, Ishmael also developed a connection with Mr. Sokolow’s daughter. After Ishmael finished telling the narrator his history, he told him that the subject of his teaching was captivity. He argues humans are also held captive by their work and the Earth is held captive by human actions. The chapter concludes with the narrator sharing the reason why he decided he ended up in the position.

His reason was that a paper that he had to write for a philosophy class prompted him to wonder if he had been lied to or not. The following day, the narrator was unsure if the experience from the previous day was a dream or not.

Chapter Two

Chapter two begins with the narrator and Ishmael discussing their shared interest in Nazi Germany. Ishmael asserted that Hitler did not only take Jews as captives but also the entire German nation. The Germans were captivated by the story that the Aryan race had lost their rightful place in the world, magnified by Hitler's charisma.

Ishmael relates the story back to the narrator and says that people like him I've also been made captive by the story. When the narrator cannot come up with a story in relation to Ishmael’s claim, the point was proven that the story of civilization has become invisible to humans similarly to how “water is invisible to fish”. Ishmael explained that “mother culture” is the cultural environment around the narrator that influences perceptions based on what people think is the right thing to do. The only way to think other than what mother culture says is to figure the true story. Ishmael then goes on to define two key terms: takers and leaver. He suggested calling the world's “civilized” people "Takers," and the “primitive” people the "Leavers". Takers are unified by their desire for civilization, while leavers are more so avoiding civilization. Ishmael says that the journey is ultimately more important than the final destination. Ishmael made it his mission to prove that culture consists of many stories shared through many ways such as through art, music, or families. Ishmael then described the basic history of the human culture. Humans began with Leavers, a group of people who did not survive because they did not take advantage of the environment. The Takers are the humans who started agriculture and developed civilizations only succeeded because they took advantage of the Earth. Finally, Ishmael proposed that history does not have the Leavers, followed by the Takers, but instead the two operating at the same time, and writing two separate stories.

Chapter Three

The next day, the narrator was greeted in the room by a tape recorder. The narrator, carrying from the end of the previous day, continued to insist that human culture has no creation myth. The narrator’s idea culture may have some truth where it came from, but it is hardly a “story”. He sees it as the “truth.” Ishmael identified that all cultures have their own beliefs, and told the narrator to record the story of his own culture. The narrator began by stating that it all started with the “accepted” Big Bang Theory, progressed through the theory of evolution for the middle, and ended with the appearance of men. After replaying the recording and not hearing anything that appears to be fiction, response to the narrator, Ishmael proposes his story. His story begins with an anthropologist roaming the earth. When he stumbles upon a jellyfish, he asks it for its creation myth. The jellyfish then responded in a very similar way to the narrator, stating that there was nothing false in their creation story and went on to tell the anthropologist a very similar factual account with the account ending with the appearance of the jellyfish. Ishmael pointed out that evolution is not dictated by humankind. Ishmael drove home the idea that humans are merely another small part of the history of life on Earth. The narrator concluded that the claim of the Taker’s story was that "the world was made for man". Ishmael suggested the claim that man can treat the Earth however he wants, causes humans to blame the evils they brought upon on the fact that Earth was to be dominated by man.

Chapter Four

The next day begins with a confident narrator telling the story of human progression. He asserted that the Leavers did not know that the Earth was created for them, much like the animals around them. It was not until the Neolithic Revolution that man settled down in a location and conquered the greatest limiting factor for progress: the ability to have a stable food source. When man discovered how to manipulate the environment enough to farm on it, everything else came along with it. Agriculture led to advances such as settlement, division of labor, class, trade, science, and art. The narrator concluded that this was the middle of the story of culture. Ishmael, impressed with the narrator’s work, agreed that agriculture represented the beginning of the narrator’s culture. As the human impact begins to grow on the Earth, organized civilizations become much harder to imagine without humans. In response to Ishmael’s question, the narrator imagines a world of jungle, untamed, and was convinced that it was destiny for mankind to take control. The lesson concludes with the realization that humans are willing to give up the well-being of the environment in forms such as pollution and depletion of resources in order to have civilization. Ishmael ties his claims about the story making the most impact by stating that human actions are not based on human nature, but instead based on the story that they believe in.

Chapter Five

The chapter began by discussing the end of the story of culture. After conquering the world through agriculture and civilization, man was confronted by another problem: the Earth does not last forever. Therefore, mankind cannot continue to consume the resources without terrible consequences. Eventually, the water and food will run out and nothing can be done to restore either. The solution to this problem, the narrator concluded, was to continue conquering nature, and at a quick rate. Mankind must continue researching science, must continue to find ways to curb pollution and increase food productivity. Humans will have to continue exploring the universe, searching for new worlds to conquer, and new resources to consume. This all must be done before the resources are fully depleted. The narrator and Ishmael then discuss the intentions of humans and ultimately conclude that humans are not evil by nature but the story of the Takers is destructive nevertheless. Ishmael notices that all Takers depend on prophets such as Jesus, while Leavers do not. The prominence of prophets in Taker culture suggested that humans aren’t capable of answering those questions for themselves. The undermining flaw with humans, according to the Taker culture, was that they don’t know what will end up making them happy and how to achieve it. The interactions between the two have begun to be more of a mentor-mentee situation. Ishmael is not only providing key idea, he is leading the narrator in the right direction to discover the new ideas on his own.

Chapter Six

The very next morning, Ishmael had noticed that the narrator seem to somewhat nervous. This time, Ishmael gives the example of flight to prove his point. He proposed that despite knowing what can fly, people with continue to question how they are flying. This relates to the environmental impact of humans because we know that what we do harms the environment, yet we question why we should care to prevent it. Ishmael reiterates the fact that humans are selfish and do not care about the consequences of their actions. Ishmael also suddenly asked the narrator if he knew about the law of gravity. The narrator responded that he did and later mentioned that the law of gravity was derived because the people who derived it was carefully studying it, rather than something else. Ishmael’s point is that you have to be well studied in nature in order to make certain assumptions about it. You cannot understand the reasons behind reactions without first learning the basics. Ishmael ties the law of gravity to the dynamics of flight. He proposes the question asking if the law about gravity is about flight. This really got me thinking because I had never really considered the direct relation between the two. I can implement this form of thinking into the way I perceive elements in nature. Ishmael concludes with a statement saying that trial and error are a good way to figure out how to fly but that is not the case for starting civilization. This is likely because if a civilization begins digging too deep into the environment, there is no telling how much the environment will be affected.

Chapter Seven

The new day begins with a puzzle. The narrator is challenged to isolate himself from a separate civilization and then find out what he can about them. This is exactly the situation that Ishmael was in during the very beginning of this book. As the novel progresses, I see more of a switching of roles between the narrator and Ishmael. The narrator is put into new situations which may not have occurred and Ishmael is teaching things that would not have been able to be taught otherwise. The laws that allow the civilizations to coexist is a peacekeeping law. Nature was left to prosper because the Leavers respected the law and left nature untouched. However, when the Takers came in, they totally messed up the balance. Mankind claims they are exempt from the law because the gods created the Earth for them to rule. At this point, the narrator is feeling dejected because the realization that humans were significantly hurting the Earth and nobody even knew about it, or at least they choose to ignore it. The narrator began to count the days until it was all over.

Chapter Eight

This time, Ishmael goes further into the relationship between the leavers and the takers. The Leavers are too passive with what is available to them and the Takers just came in and snatched up all resources. The leavers had nothing left to work with and it was not just the people who were lost, it was the Leaver mentality. All new people became Takers in order to survive. Despite the peacekeeping law that occurs in nature, there still must be competition or else the food chain would no longer exist. If prey were getting fed up of being attacked by a lion, and the lion was forced to stop, the game would get out of hand and exterminate their prey. Everything in nature is very intricate and is in balance. The Takers went in and cause the environment to no longer be in balance. This principle is key because without the takers, all of nature would live in balance, even if there is some conflict due to food competition. The takers, in the form of agriculturalists, take the land that used to be for grazing or even the homes of forest creatures and manipulated it for personal use. If there happens to be a disaster where no crops can be grown, then there is truly an irreversible situation. In a famine, every creature would starve, especially humans. Additionally, human population growth cannot be underlooked. The massive amount of people require more food and resources than ever before, straining the ecosystem to the point of no return.

Chapter Nine

For the first time, Ishmael and the narrator are on the same side of the glass. Their relationship has grown at an unprecedented rate. The narrator realized how important that glass wall really was so that he did not get intimidated by Ishmael’s figure. It is established that the takers were active when the agricultural revolution began around 8000 BC. Ishmael makes a reference to the Bible with the Garden of Eden and Adam. The tree of knowledge of good and evil represents the difference between life and death. It is not a matter if Adam would gain the knowledge but if he had imagined that he did. If his story was influenced by his imagination, he could have a different approach towards living. The story of Cain and Abel was also used to represent the splitting of the first river valleys which supported human agriculture. The takers could be seen as represented by the brother who murdered his other half because he was jealous of the fertile land. Not only did the takers snatch everything for themselves, they did it with no remorse for the other humans or nature around them.

This message is especially inspiring because the agriculturalists were once seen as the greatest achievement of mankind but now with all the evil associated with it, it seems like more of an unfortunate occurrence than one that should be praised. Ishmael concludes the lesson by stating that the most wanted knowledge of the takers is the knowledge of good and evil because it presents a way where humans have an opportunity to raise to power.