Inability to Escape the Teacher, and Human Race

Unlike The Jungle, Ishmael doesn’t show strong tragic moments constructing the conventional form (dealing with individual character) of tragedy, though the novel deals with the limit of human races which threaten us, and ends with the death of Ishmael. The novel targets whole people in the earth.

When the novel first shows the protagonist, he seems to be tired of the way of the world, and even hates his monotonous life. When he first appears, he chokes and curses to the ad which reads ”Must have an earnest desire to save the world” (Quinn 4). However, once he meets the teacher who is a gorilla, he starts to ask unlimited questions, “why & how?”, and starts to find answers by visiting the teacher’s office in regular basis, with totally changed behavior. In this way, the novel depicts the main character’s desire and happiness to pursue the truth and the knowledge from the teacher he never expected before that a gorilla would give a lesson, and human kills its nest.

Besides, the whole dialogue in the novel shows human’s cruelty about unlimited consumption without fear and the remains what human has left. As the lesson of Ishmael proceeds, the newly gained thoughts and conclusions made by stases seemed to make us feel sorrow by itself, because most results of the conversation gives us our inability to save the earth that we readers are encouraged to feel emptiness. Also the novel highlights the main character’s inability to help his teacher to escape. Likewise, the novel hints readers the problem is that even if we know the reason of problem and the way to solve it, it is a literally huge project which is really difficult to practice. Hence readers are guided to find inability to undo the mistake we made, and impossibility to come back to the time when the takers first appeared.