Ishmael's Culture In 'The Takers' By Daniel Quinn

Nathan Nichol

Mrs. Ambrose

English II

12 July, 2023

Ishmael Essay

“‘Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?’ ‘Which wants to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.’‘And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world.’” (Quinn 28). Daniel Quinn immediately establishes in the novel Ishmael that the people of the student's culture, the “Takers,” as named by Ishmael, are destroying the world, whether intentionally or not. Using Quinn’s logic, the reader can determine that the Takers, a group in which I consider myself to be a member of, are the reason that the Earth is in the state that it is.

Ishmael presents the reader with two

The Takers are described by the teacher Ishmael simply as the people of the student’s culture. But more specifically, Ishmael elaborates on alternative terms already used by the Takers following a protest from the student, ‘I don’t see how you can lump everyone else in the world into one category like that.’ ‘This is the way it’s done in your own culture, except that you use a pair of heavily loaded terms instead of these relatively neutral ones. You call yourselves civilized and all the rest primitive,’”(Quinn 41). Quinn likely expects the reader to have already determined what group they belong to, given that most would assume that a “primitive” person would be illiterate. However, the Takers are only one group of two, and Daniel Quinn presents information to the reader regarding the Leaver peoples. Ishmael claims that the Taker and the Leaver peoples are enacting two entirely separate stories, and to prove his point, Ishmael names several groups that fall into the Leaver category, “The Bushmen of Africa, the Alawa of Australia, the Kreen-Akrore of Brazil, and

These arguments are presented to the reader through the interaction between the teacher Ishmael, and the unnamed student, and nearly all of them are presented in a logical manner. One such instance is when Ishmael mentions the Takers who tried to “change” in the sixties and seventies, “People can’t just give up a story. That’s what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in,”(Quinn 230). Daniel Quinn is likely referring to the “hippies” of the 60s and 70s, who rejected the traditional lifestyle at that time, forgoing their former lives as Takers and becoming something new entirely. Quinn here is making the argument that ultimately the “hippies” disappeared, because of the fact that they were not really enacting a story, but more of an anti-story to that of the traditional taker story. This is logical because if one was able to live without enacting a story, then logically speaking the hippies would still be around. Another excellent instance of a logical argument presented by Daniel Quinn would be when Ishmael and student were discussing some of the themes in the bible, “‘The gods ruled the world for billions of years, and it was doing just fine. After just a