Why has no one ever told us how our world was born? 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” takes us through an incredible sequence of events. We will learn as Julie, a young teenager who goes through her own paradigm shift through the teachings of a telepathic gorilla, Ishmael. Ishmael helps Julie see the world in a completely new way, making it easier for her to understand how the world might have been different if certain events hadn't happened in our past. Daniel Quinn uses parables and allusions to help us reach a new understanding of our world, teaching us to think differently about things we knew to be true our whole lives. The use of parables in the novel makes it easier to describe people's different cultures and help us see more clearly what happened to people and their way of life throughout history. We begin to think about history in a different light, looking at it from a completely different perspective than the way we were taught in school and by our parents and grandparents things we believed to be true our entire lives. Quinn's use of one of these early parables discusses how people at the beginning of time made decisions and choices that created the culture we have today: Terpsichore…. This was a planet (named after the muse of dance by the way)…. For a while they lived like everyone else lives, simply eating what came to hand... they noticed that it was very easy to encourage the regrowth of their favorite foods…. They didn't need to take these steps to stay alive…. Some dance steps... three or four days a month... required almost no effort... Some continued to... middle of paper... the indigenous people, create a clear representation of their cultures by 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, creating images in our heads 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 the different tribes and cultures Quinn describes give the impression that what he says is true because they are closely related to what we have heard and learned since we were young. Creating questions in our minds, making us wonder whether his accounts of history hold any truth and, if they do, what, if anything, we should do about it?