He explains how, at the zoo, captive animals have a sense of living an unnatural life. Ishmael (though he does not provide his name yet) was born in West Africa and captured from his mother when he was young, by two famous animal collectors, who sold him to a zoo in the Northeast United States. The gorilla explains that he is the teacher, and then launches into his own back-story. Strangely, when he makes eye-contact with the gorilla, he discovers that they can communicate telepathically. Perplexed and agitated, the narrator falls into the chair to think. On the wall behind the gorilla is a sign which reads, “WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?” (9). On the other side of that window sits a full-grown gorilla (this is Ishmael). The mostly-empty room holds a small bookcase, a chair and a large plate glass window that looks into an adjacent room.

He finds the building across town, and walks into the office to discover that it smells like a menagerie. Nevertheless, the narrator decides to investigate the advertisement, to satisfy his belief that this is some sort of scam. So the potential of some huckster attempting to rekindle long-dead desires now angers him. He never found such a teacher, and believes that something died within him when he “wised up” and stopped searching (6). These hopes were eventually quashed as he learned that there was no secret knowledge. Even when the revolts dwindled by the years of his mid-teens, he refused to give up hope, and sought a teacher who might have a secret wisdom that could dispel his “disillusionment and bewilderment” (5). He explains that his indignation stems from his adolescent desire to find a teacher who could show him how to 'save the world.' During the social revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, he had believed that a new era was beginning, one in which people would become aware of the danger that the world faced. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.

The unnamed narrator is angry over an advertisement he has read in the personals section of his newspaper.

Ismael daniel quinn