Why has no one ever told us how our world really came to be? This novel offers us a completely new and different way of looking at our world. The protagonist, Julie, of Daniel Quinn's novel, "My Ishmael", guides us through an incredible sequence of events. We learn how Julie, a young teenager who is going through her own personal paradigm shift through the teachings of a telepathic gorilla, Ishmael. Ishmael helps Julie see the world in a completely new way, allowing her to understand how different the world could have been if certain events had not happened in our past. Daniel Quinn uses parables and allusions to help us achieve a new understanding of our world. It teaches us to think differently about things that we have known to be true all our lives. The use of parables in the novel makes it easier to describe the different cultures of the people. and help us see more clearly what has happened to people and their way of life throughout history. We begin to think about history from a different perspective, looking at it from a completely different angle than the way we were taught in school and by our parents and grandparents about things that we believed to be true, all our lives. Quinn's use of one of these early parables explains how people at the beginning of time made decisions and choices that created the culture we have today: Terpsichore…. It was a planet (named, incidentally, after the muse of dance)…. For a while, they lived like everyone else, simply eating whatever they could get their hands on…they noticed that it was very easy to encourage their favorite foods to regrow…. They did not have to take these measures to stay alive…. A few dance steps...three or four days a month...required almost no effort....Some continued to...... middle of paper ......indigenous people, create a clear representation of the cultures to which they belong referring to. The differences between the many tribes and their diversity create an allusion that the reader can easily decipher. Throughout the novel, Quinn discusses his stories with us through parables and allusions so that we (the readers) can better identify with what he is telling us, thus creating images. in our head that we can relate to and understand very easily. The legends he describes become clear and vivid in the way he tells his versions of the truth. All of the different tribes and cultures that Quinn describes make what he says seem true because they are so closely related to what we heard and learned when we were young. Creating questions in our minds, making us wonder if his accounts of history contain any truths and if so, what, if anything, should we do about it.?