Book Review of The Storytelling Animal

The Storytelling Animal is an expository non-fiction book by Jonathan Gottschall analyzing the history of stories and human’s attraction to them. It was published in 2012 and thus contains many up-to-date references and comparisons. I believe Gottschall’s main objective in writing this book is to bring us all to the conclusion that he has reached in his research. Throughout the entirety of his book, Gottschall effectively pulls us back to main ideas he wants us to understand and accept, that we are innately storytelling animals, that are addicted to stories ourselves, have always been and will always be, by using topics that build upon one another, using relatable examples, and supporting arguments with research and studies.

Purpose and effect of storytelling/The art and desire of storytelling has been in our blood since the beginning of creatures, humans and animals alike.

Let’s go to the beginning. Gottschall opens with a snippet on the Hamlet writing monkeys. “Statisticians agree that if they could only catch some immortal monkeys, lock them up in a room with a typewriter, and get them to furiously thwack keys for a long, long time, the monkeys would eventually flail out a perfect reproduction of Hamlet.” Gottschall uses this to pull in his reader, a bang at the beginning, but how could this possibly relate to why humans like stories. This is where Gottschall shows his skills as a writer. Many non-fiction writers will tell us at the very beginning what they plan to ramble on about for the next few pages, outlining how everything connects back to the topic at hand. Needless to say, this is not how Gottschall wrote The Storytelling Animal. The author arranges his ideas topically. Occasionally the chapters separate the main topic...

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.... But if you flip to a few chapters later, we see a whole chapter on ‘Night Stories’, or dreams. Gottschall builds up the ideas that are essential to the understanding of dreams as stories in the few chapters in between. “In our dreams…we commit atrocities; we suffer tragedies….,” a statement from “Night Stories” that is seemingly unrelated to the book as a whole, unless we reflect on the idea from the previous chapter Gottschall talks of how humans are addicted to bad endings. When we look for connections between these of the topics, we can see that they are intertwined. Upon reflecting on the book as a whole after reading and rereading Gottschall’s writing, I begun to see this complex structure of topics he has woven together. All of the topics in this structure work together to deepen the reader’s understanding of the storytelling animal and what it’s all about.