The way the narrator approaches Ishmael here serves as a good model for the way he approaches almost of all of Ishmael's lesson.

The narrator's enlightenment comes from first recognizing what he sees, then realizing that Mother Culture has discouraged him from approaching those things in a new way. The narrator recognizes things that he is already familiar with (like the Big Bang theory), yet with Ishmael views them in a way that is unfamiliar to him. This prefigures an important theme that continues to resonate throughout the novel. This concept explains the way in which the narrator is unnerved by Ishmael's human-like features when they first meet. The uncanny creates a cognitive dissonance that sometimes leads us to outright reject it. Here, Quinn uses the Freudian concept of the uncanny, which occurs when something is simultaneously familiar and foreign, and thus frightening. 'I could look at nothing else in the world but his face, more hideous than any other in the animal kingdom because of its similarity to our own, yet in its way more noble than any Greek ideal of perfection.' The Narrator, page 8 It depends on evaluating the status quo, and rethinking the way that society is currently living.

Quinn uses this device to alert readers to the fact that everyone has the ability to change the world it does not depend on finding new information or wisdom. So what is most frustrating to the narrator (in the passage above) is that he senses he has all the tools to discover this on his own, but lacks a system by which to properly use those tools. In fact, much of what Ishmael teaches the narrator involves knowledge he already has - what is new is the way Ishmael arranges that information, the new perspective on it that he presents. He felt that he was being lied to about something, but could never articulate what that lie was.Īs we discover both in this passage and through the novel, the frustration comes from the difficulty, and not the desire. In his teenage years, the narrator sought a teacher who could tell him what was wrong with the world. But I didn't know that then' The Narrator, page 5Įarly on, the narrator grows indignant at Ishmael's ad, since it reminds him of earlier disappointments. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library. 'He was like me-he just yearned for there to be someone in the world like Leo, someone with a secret knowledge and a wisdom beyond his own.

Ishmael by daniel quinn