The Storytelling Animal

CC: Flickr User Reeding Lessons

In reading the first two chapters of Johnathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal, I was reminded of the extent to which stories actually do run human emotions. We hear stories every day, we make our own in our heads, and we constantly carry stories with us in the darks of our mind. Stories rule our world because, quite honestly, they are at the base of our existence. Without stories and storytelling, we wouldn't be able to tell our thoughts, emotions, hopes and dreams to the people around us -- very much limiting our human contact and, in turn, our humanity.
The thing I enjoyed the most about Gottschall's story was when he included a passage from Moby Dick. Fully capturing the reader's attention, Gottschall then asks what processes the reader's mind went through while reading this passage about a grotesque cannibalistic scene. I loved this part not because I am a cannibal, but because Gottchall so accurately identifies the processes of the mind in reading a story -- that we are slaves to the wandering of our minds, that we cannot control where our imagination leads us when a story is presented to the windows of our minds.
Finally, I really enjoyed Gottschall's writing style; casual enough to be telling a story, but serious enough to get a point across. This comical writing style is probably my favorite, because it is a lot easier for the reader to get a personalized experience from the author's writing. Always including personal anecdotes and jokes here and there leaves a lot up to the imagination and up to the reader, especially on how to interpret (and react to) the messages given off by the writer. All in all, this was a story worth telling.