Ishmael

Ishmael is a philosophical novel by the American writer Daniel Quinn, published in 1992. It was awarded the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship a year before it appeared in print, and it is written largely as a Socratic conversation between two characters.

The narrator answers a personal advertisement placed by a teacher who is looking for a pupil who wants to save the world, and discovers that the teacher is a gorilla called Ishmael who can speak to him without words. Most of the book is the conversation that follows.

Ishmael's argument is that several of the assumptions modern society treats as facts, including the idea that human beings are the purpose of the world, are in fact cultural myths, and that those myths produce catastrophic consequences for people and for the environment. The book is arranged as a course of lessons rather than as a plot, and the narrator reports what he is taught as he is taught it. Quinn set the ideas out again in two later books, The Story of B and My Ishmael, and described how he arrived at them in an autobiography.