The Storytelling Animal is a non-fiction book by Jonathan Gottschall analyzing the history of stories and man's attraction to them. It was published in 2012 and therefore contains many current references and comparisons. I believe Gottschall's main goal in writing this book is to bring us all to the conclusion he reached in his research. Throughout his book, Gottschall effectively brings us back to the main ideas he wants us to understand and accept, namely that we are inherently story-telling animals, that we ourselves are addicted to stories, that we have always been and always will be, using topics that build on each other, using relevant examples, and supporting arguments with research and study. Purpose and Effect of Storytelling/The art and desire of telling stories has been in our blood since the beginning of creatures, humans and animals. Let's go to the beginning. Gottschall opens with an excerpt of the apes writing Hamlet. "Statisticians agree that if they could only catch immortal monkeys, lock them in a room with a typewriter, and get them to type furiously on keys for a long, long time, the monkeys would eventually produce a perfect reproduction of Hamlet." Gottschall uses this to draw his reader in, a bang at first, but how could this relate to why humans love stories. It is here that Gottschall shows his talents as a writer. Many nonfiction writers will tell us up front what they plan to talk about in the next few pages, describing how everything relates to the topic at hand. Needless to say, this is not how Gottschall wrote The Storytelling Animal. The author organizes his ideas by theme. Sometimes the chapters separate the main topic...... middle of paper...... But if you go through a few chapters later, we see a whole chapter on "Night Stories", or dreams. Gottschall develops the ideas essential to understanding dreams in story form in the intervening few chapters. “In our dreams…we commit atrocities; we suffer from tragedies…”, a statement from “Night Stories” that seemingly has no relevance to the book as a whole, unless we think about the idea from the previous chapter. Gottschall talks about how humans are addicted to bad endings. When we look for connections between these topics, we can see that they are closely related. As I thought about the book as a whole after reading and re-reading Gottschall's writing, I began to see this complex structure of topics that he had woven together. All the topics in this structure work together to deepen the reader's understanding of the animal narrator and what it is about..