Ishmael’s primary goal is to convince the narrator that culture is the acting out of a narrative, which inherently frames that narrative as a myth. This discussion follows similar logic and reasoning to the ideas of critical theory, in which the ideological foundations for culture and society are questioned based on their implied assumptions. Ishmael is an exercise in ecocriticism, which examines the assumptions of a culture relating to the environment, non-human species, and how humans are or are not different from the remainder of natural life. The basic difference between Ishmael’s Takers and Leavers is that the Takers view themselves as distinct and above nature, while the Leavers view themselves as an integrated component of nature, and each of these views can be expressed as an ideologically driven narrative.

Early in the narrator and Ishmael’s discussions, Ishmael defines a story as a “scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods” (41), and he defines culture as the enacting of that scenario by a community of people. The “story” in this situation, though linked to “the gods” in Ishmael’s methodology, relates more to what people believe to be entirely true or beyond scrutiny, which is divine in this explanation.