Ishmael: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

After this lesson, the narrator gets an unexpected visitor. His uncle is in town, and he ends up staying with him for two days, though the entire time the narrator wants him to leave. After the uncle departs, the narrator finds that he has work to do, and so he doesn’t see Ishmael for another two days. As the narrator works, he feels a sense of dread that he can’t put into words.

In the middle of his work, the narrator realizes that he has a sore tooth. He goes to a dentist, and ends up having one his molars removed. The dentist prescribes painkillers, which the narrator consumes along with bourbon. As a result of his dentist appointment, the narrator misses another day of his lessons with Ishmael.

The narrator returns to Ishmael’s building after nearly a week away, and is surprised to find workers clearing out the room. He asks one of these workers what happened to the old tenant. The worker guesses that “the old lady” wasn’t paying rent.

Determined to find Ishmael, the narrator looks through the phone book for the last name “Sokolow.” He finds the address for a Grace Sokolow, which he traces to a magnificent mansion outside of the city. There, the narrator speaks to a butler, who informs him that Grace Sokolow died three months ago. The narrator presses the butler, whose name is Partridge, for details about Ishmael, but Partridge is reluctant to tell the narrator anything. In the end, he tells the narrator that it’s none of his business how Mrs. Sokolow died, where Rachel lives, or what happened to Ishmael.

In order to find Ishmael, the narrator places an ad in the paper, appealing to “friends of Ishmael.” No one answers this ad, so the narrator decides to search circuses and fairs for new gorillas. Eventually, he finds a carnival, the Darryl Hicks Carnival, which has acquired a new gorilla named “Gargantua.” With this in mind, the narrator drives two hours to the carnival, where he finds Ishmael displayed in a cage. As he approaches the cage, he overhears two men talking. The first man says that the gorilla could easily rip away the bars of his cage. The second man agrees, but notes, laughing, that the gorilla doesn’t know this. The narrator is infuriated by this conversation.

The narrator approaches Ishmael, who merely looks at him in silence. The narrator asks Ishmael why he didn’t try to avoid his eviction notice—Ishmael must have been forewarned of Mrs. Sokolow’s death. Ishmael says nothing. The narrator asks Ishmael if Ishmael is angry. Ishmael tells the narrator not to patronize him. He adds that he and the narrator can go on with their lessons—there’s no need for the narrator to become “failure number five.”

The narrator, relieved to be talking to Ishmael once again, asks Ishmael how they’ll communicate from now on. Even as he says this, a family approaches the gorilla, and sees the narrator seemingly talking to a mute animal. Ishmael tells the narrator to stop talking and leave him alone. The narrator insists that there must be some way to free Ishmael from his cage, but Ishmael says that he’d rather live in captivity than depend on other people for food and shelter. He tells the narrator to go away, and the narrator reluctantly does so.

The narrator has dinner and a drink at a nearby restaurant. He returns to the carnival around 9 pm. He bribes a carnival worker to let him talk to the gorilla for a few hours. The “bribee” sneers, but accepts the bribe, and leads the narrator to Ishmael.

The narrator asks Ishmael, point-blank, what the next lesson will be. In response, Ishmael asks the narrator to define “culture.” The narrator defines culture as the sum of all recorded knowledge among a people. Ishmael agrees, and points out that Leavers have a culture, just as Takers do. Leaver culture stretches back millions of years. Taker culture, by contrast, begins only 10,000 years ago, with the founding of agriculture. In general, the Taker attitude is to reject as much of the past as possible. Until very recently, in fact, Takers believed that human life and human culture began at the same time.

Ishmael points out a strange contradiction in Taker society. Takers want to look forward to the future and reject history as “bunk”—for instance, politicians and other prophets are always encouraging their followers to be optimistic and think only of things to come. At the same time, Takers also place tremendous value in tradition, the past, and history. The British monarchy, for instance is founded on a sense of tradition that stretches back many centuries. The Leavers, by contrast, don’t accept this contradiction. They are the carriers of a vast tradition, based on obeying the laws of life, which stretches back millions of years to the beginning of the human species.

The narrator has a thought that he finds difficult to put into words. The Leavers, he now sees, have based their behavior on three million years of trial and error. The Takers, on the other hand, reject almost all of those three million years—everything before conquest and agriculture is nonsense. The Takers thus have to deal with a conspicuous absence of “evidence” for how to live—at best, they only have a few thousand years of practice. One result of this that the Takers feel the need to turn to prophets and lawmakers—Draco, Solon, Moses, Jesus, Hitler—for new, entirely arbitrary theories of how to live. The arrogant message behind each one of these theories is that each proclaims that it, and it alone, is the right way to live.

Ishmael agrees with the distinction the narrator is trying to make. Leaver societies, he suggests, rely on millions of years of trial and error for a model of how to behave. Takers, on the other hand, ignore the Leaver societies and their years of evidence for how to live well. With this, Ishmael dismisses the narrator, saying that he is too cold and tired to think about the matter any further.