Editing Ishmael (Quinn novel) (section)

==Characters==

===Main characters===
* Ishmael is a gorilla, born in the 1930s, when he was captured from the West African wild and sent to an American zoo. After the zoo sold him to a menagerie, Walter Sokolow bought him and discovered that they could communicate telepathically. A few years after Sokolow died in 1985, Ishmael sets up an office and newspaper advertisements in search of pupils, with the help of Sokolow's daughter, in order to begin teaching the subject of "captivity". The narrator and Ishmael meet in 1991.
* The narrator and protagonist is a middle-aged white American man who sought a teacher to show him how to save the world when he was younger, during the turbulent and idealistic 1960s. Now an adult, he finds Ishmael's ad looking for a pupil who wants to save the world. Intrigued because his childhood question may be answered, but skeptical because he has never found answers in the past, he goes and discovers this new teacher: Ishmael. The narrator never reveals his name in the novel, though it is revealed in the sequel ''[[My Ishmael]]'' to be Alan Lomax.

===Unseen characters===
*Walter Sokolow is a wealthy European Jewish merchant who is mentioned only in Ishmael's [[back story]] but has died by the time of the main story. His family was killed in the Holocaust, during which Sokolow fled to the United States. While visiting a menagerie during World War Two, he came across a gorilla called Goliath (Ishmael's given alias at the menagerie). After figuring out that he and Ishmael could mentally speak to each other, Sokolow renamed the gorilla "Ishmael" and bought him from the zoo. The two studied a vast array of subjects together and, after his death in 1985, Sokolow's adult daughter Rachel funds Ishmael's upkeep, though she herself dies from AIDS in 1991.