Point of View

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit is told in the first person, past tense by a participant in the action, an unnamed Baby Boomer brought up in the troubled 1960s who has continued to long for a mentor who can show him how to save the world. Finally, in the 1990s, he finds a someone advertising for a student for the express purpose of saving the world and finds, surprisingly, the teacher is an enormous, captive gorilla, Ishmael. Ishmael has, over a sixty-odd year long lifetime, perfected the ability to communicate mentally with humans, undertaken a broad liberal education, and four times already tried but failed to teach a human how to save the world. On occasion, perhaps in recognition of the unlikeliness of this scenario, the narrator addresses asides to his reader, asking his/her reaction to what he has just written and...