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Daniel Quinn's Ishmael

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It is obvious from many perspectives that the world is going in an unsustainable path. There is currently a constant question of how long human society will last into the future if things continue the way they have been. The book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn works to explain how the world got to be the way it is now. The book does this by explaining human captivity to destructive ideals, the oppression of sustainable societies to continue the unsustainable one, and by explaining a story of the world including the past and the future. However, first it is necessary to understand the plot of the novel in order to truly explain the main points it makes. Ishmael is about a gorilla, named Ishmael, that teaches the main character about the background …show more content…

In this book, the former people group is referred to as “Takers” while the latter group is referred to as “Leavers.” The primary source that Ishmael uses to explain this point is the Bible. At the beginning of the Bible, Cain kills Abel. Ishmael believes that this is actually a comparison that compares a person killing his brother to a people group killing a fellow people group (Quinn, 1992, p. 104). It is important to note that Cain’s primary job is growing food while Abel raises animals. In addition, Ishmael uses ancient maps to drive this point home. He shows that early on agriculture is small, but as time goes on, the agricultural group drives out the pastoral group. Thus, a comparison could easily be made that the agricultural group is trying to kill the pastoral group. In addition, Ishmael draws upon the history of the United States as well to explain this. As the colonists arrived from Europe, the native people of the continent were shoved out to make room for the “Takers.” In this case, they especially deserve to be called “Takers” because they took the land from the “Leavers.” While many countries have stopped taking land from the “Leavers,” they also do not give the land back to them (McGreal, 2012). Thus, this oppression still has not really stopped in today’s society which means that the “Takers” are still continuing their hazardous ways (even though they are starting to

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Even after seeing all the damage that was caused, people still seeked to take it even if it created disasters. By the end all the “wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth, [and] all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food” (5). Greed for more money, more power, and more influence, brought society to fail. People used all of the Earth's resources for themselves, not thinking about the consequences of the future. The author heeds a warning for those reading to stop and think about the future to not think about just in yourself but to be considerate to not take all for yourself.

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Throughout the book these quotes are what kept Ishmael striving to

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Document F illustrates a different point of view of this same idea with the actual native people who were being overtaken by Europeans and Americans

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As mentioned before in chapter 1 his interest in the appearance of moon. For the past couple of years Ishmael has been trained how to be a soldier, he has learned many thing like learning how to survive, fight, and kill. After learning all of this he has been able to break through his self conscious with the help of Esther and Leslie. Ishmael has regained his past common knowledge of his family history. He remembers his conversation between his grandmother and him about an important lesson she gave him, about how the spiritual world and real world connect.

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The Native Americans were being driven out of their own land so that Americans could wear out the land with their tobacco. Tobacco was called the poor man’s crop, although after a couple years the land was worn out and could grow no more. A chief from the Iroquois Confederacy knew this

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Without wheat to sell, (due to the locusts) how would the Ingalls family get through the bitter winter?” This shows the locusts no only damaged farms physically but their actions also damaged farms financially. The article explains how farmers in the

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We leveled your forests; our hands removed the stumps from the field… We have been with you… in adversity, and by the help of God will be with you in prosperity.” Brooks now believes that, although everyone drew from the Exodus Story, many still lost their sense of purpose and turned into self-interested “radical secularists”. But that is where

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Ishmael: The Adventure of the Mind and Spirit “The law we live by is like the law of gravity: There is no escaping it, but there is a way of achievement that is equivalent of flight-“.(Ishmael, pg 105) Daniel Quinn, the award winning American author, is best known as a cultural critic and publisher of educational texts. Quinn chose to write the socially challenging novel; Ishmael, with the purpose of expressing his concern over human civilization, and to bring awareness to our self destruction in hope for it to come to an end. Quinn believes that we cannot escape our true primal instincts, and our attempts to counter the laws of nature to control the world we live in, is in fact destroying it.

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Takers are individuals who take more than what they need and do not think about consequences that could arise from their actions. While, leavers are people whom only take what they need and think about their actions and how it could affect other aspects of life. Ishmael believes that everyone was a leaver before 8,000 B.C. because they were hunter and gathers and only got what they needed. However during the time of 8,000 B.C, the agricultural revolution happened, the agricultural revolution resulted in farmer’s ability to till the ground better and produce more food than they ever have before. This led to land never used for farming to be used for agricultural purposes as well as the beginning of large scale farming operations.

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As the story progresses, the reader sees that desires become a more important role in Ishmael’s life and it made him from being an innocent child into a bloodthirsty soldier only looking for something to slaughter. From these transitioning desires Ishmael becomes less and less stable, making him easily

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Without the nature and pieces of earth that surrounded him at this time, Ishmael's life could very well have been over. The fruit, which could have been poisonous, provided him with sustenance during his stay in the patch of woods. He noted that even “birds came to eat this strange fruit” every morning. Without this fruit, Ishmael would’ve starved. The sounds of nature help Ishmael cope with the loneliness and his terrifying memories of what he had experienced before.

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In this statement, Ishmael states that humanity is not flawed or wrong, it is just misleaded. Humanity will follow whatever path if given a story it 's supposed to fulfill. We call it future or our destiny. He uses examples of us following a story that states humanity following according the the law of nature. The other story he uses is the one that the narrator claimed was humanity 's story.

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They are not happy and content with what the tribes have done for them. They want to take and take until the Indians have nothing

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The first chapter of Joel describes a horrible time of desperation of the people of Israel. An army of darkness and sin has captured them with great ease. A great swarm of locusts ate the crops such as grapes, olives, and barley so that there was nothing left to make neither food nor drinks. The rest of the crops dried up because of a drought,

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In the Takers and Leavers’ story this is mother culture, and in The Cat and the Hat this is the Cat with Thing One and Things Two. For the Takers mother culture influenced some leavers to become takers, this was the agricultural revolution and that this starts the down fall of man Ismael says. Here the narrator is reciting what Ishmael has just taught him about the agricultural revolution, “It didn’t end. It just spread. It’s been spreading ever since it began back there ten thousand years ago.”

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