The Socratic Method of Ideological Critique

In class, we discussed how Ishmael is written in the style of the socratic method. This means that there is a teacher, Ishmael, and a student, the narrator and the reader. Ishmael asks questions and allows the student to answer them, which leads to another question. In Ishmael, the line of questioning involves the ideology of the Takers and helps the reader and the narrator to find the discordant aspects of the ideology in an attempt to overturn it.

For example, Ishmael asks the student if he would be willing to leave the Taker way of life and begin to enact a Leaver story. The student adamantly says no. This happens after he realizes that the Leaver way of life is both more sustainable than the Taker’s way of life and that they are much happier people. This shows how the ideology of the Takers is contradictory. They try to reach happiness and sustain a larger and larger population, but they are neither happy nor sustainable.

The socratic method of the novel helps to overturn the ideology by drawing out ideas from the student, who in turn synthesizes them and realizes that they contradict. The book is a good example of the socratic method because its primary goal is to find the problems with the ideology instead of trying to find a story to replace it with.