The End of Ishmael

As I began reading these chapters I thought there was no way that the story could be wrapped up efficiently in such a short amount of writing. However, I discovered that I was wrong and I was pleasantly surprised.

At the beginning of chapter 10 the narrator ends up with many distractions in his life that prevent him from visiting Ishmael. In a way I think that Quinn is trying to show how many things can get in the way of humans trying to find a way to "fix" our situation without being fully devoted to the search. If the narrator really wanted to he could have gone and seen Ishmael many times and instead he put it off to do something else that was "more important" at the time.

Once the narrator finally finds Ishmael at the carnival, Ishmael doesn't want to leave and the narrator wants to find out the rest of the story. So, in order to complete the learning the narrator visits Ishmael when there are no people around. They end up talking about the Leavers' story of how they came to be. Eventually, the narrator comes to the conclusion that the Leavers are "those who live in the hands of the gods" and that they "belong to the world", while the Takers think that "the world belongs to man" and that's how it should be. This is why they are constantly trying to change the Leavers into Takers like themselves.

One of my favorite things from these chapters is when the narrator finally comes to the idea that if humans take on the Takers way of living than eventually the world will come to disaster, but if we take on the Leavers way of living "then creation will go on forever". To me this seems to be the point of the whole book. It is the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. The idea that Daniel Quinn is trying to get all of the readers to see and understand. I think that the way that he builds up the story to this point is really effective because the reader is waiting for him to tell us how we can fix things, how can we make a change in our world and he puts this information in so effortlessly that it seems to work very well.

At the end of the book, before Ishmael dies, he tells the narrator that the next step is to tell other people the story, teaching them the lessons that he learned from Ishmael. He says that this is the only way to "save the world". He suggests that the narrator teach a hundred people and then they, in turn, will teach a hundred more. Ishmael points out that with the technology in the world today that this isn't a hard feat to accomplish. He says that we can't just try to go back in time to the way things used to be, we can't just abandon our lives (like the Hohokam), but we have to invent a new way to live.