“Thank God I’m done with this book” is my first thought in reflecting upon it. To be honest the book had an interesting point to make and it was very true. However, this sounded way too philosophical for me and thats definetly not my favorite subject. What annoyed me about the book was the way it was so repetitive. I did however realize that Daniel Quin wrote that way on purpose. The student in the story constantly saying “I still don’t get it”, “but what does this have to do…”, “I’m getting there, give me a minute to think about it”. C’mon, to me this seemed like such a waste of reading time and irritating the monkey would then have to repeat itself in a different way or go back to something he mentioned earlier in the story. So why did Quin decide in his right mind to write this way? My opinion is that he wanted to depict humans as stupid creatures that take forever to really grasp a concept. This is probably the reason why the teacher happens to be a gorilla. Apparently this gorilla knows better than any other human how they should run their lives. Nice huh? He placed us inferior to a creature we believe ourselves to be more highly advanced than.
Also, Quiin drags out the entire story. The whole thing could probably be told in a short essay taking only a few pages and few minutes to read. But no, he decided to carry it out in 263 pages. It’s kinda like saying there won’t ever be an answer to fixing this whole mess we’ve put ourselves in… all we could do is refelct upon it. We can try figuring out how we came to be this way but like the student said, none of us is actually willing to truly live a “Leaver’s” life.
Another analytical thought was the death of Ishmael. Just when the student (i dun’t remember his name, or if he had one) was beginning to get closer (literally) to the gorilla (closest thing to nature that he comes to in the story) it just so happens that the goriila disappears because the rent hasnt been paid for the office space. That’s kinda like saying whenever humans get close to nature we tend to lose it without even realizing it. Just like the student tried going after Ishmael, searching for him everywhere and having to travel long distance just to see him, so do we have to go to the zoo or a crappy park to get a tiny bit closer to nature. but just the way ishmael was slowy dieing of pneumonia, so is the small amount of nature we have behind bars. We’ll only be able to diagnose what’s wrong with it when its too late and no matter how many shots (like ishmael) we put into its system, we’ll lose it.
The connection i did make about segregation was how the Takers think that just because they know good and evil, they think they know how to run people’s lives. Ishmael mentioned how Takers don’t care for “ways that can work” but for the “one right way that it can work” apparently different skin tones will be considered “ways” and being only white, blue eyed, tall, and male, is the “one right way”.
