The Story of B
First edition
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| Author | Daniel Quinn |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Bantam Dell |
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Publication date
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December 1996 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 325 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 34663431 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3567.U338 S76 1996 |
| Preceded by | Ishmael |
| Followed by | My Ishmael |
The Story of B is a 1996 novel written by Daniel Quinn and published by Bantam Publishing. It chronicles a young priest's movement away from his religion and toward the teachings of an international lecturer known as B, expanding upon many of the philosophical ideas introduced in Quinn's 1992 novel Ishmael. The Story of B acts as a spiritual successor to both the novels Ishmael and My Ishmael, also by Daniel Quinn.
The Story of B is presented as a diary of the American first-person narrator and protagonist, Fr. Jared Osborne, a Roman Catholic priest of the Laurentian order. The Laurentians have traditionally made it their duty to be the first group to recognize the Antichrist. With this mission in mind, an esteemed member of the order, Fr. Bernard Lulfre, personally tasks Jared with investigating an itinerant American lecturer, Charles Atterley, who has gained notable attention in Europe and whose ideas the Laurentians consider a potential danger to humankind. Although told that Atterley was last spotted in Austria, Jared is initially unable to track down the enigmatic preacher. Upon discovering that Atterley is more commonly known to the public as "B," Jared at last discovers him on a lecture circuit throughout major cities in Germany. Jared begins to attend each of B's speeches and takes verbatim notes that he faxes back to Lulfre. Ultimately pressed for a judgment on the possibility of B's being the Antichrist, Jared is driven to penetrate B's inner circle where he soon finds his religious foundations shaken to their core.
Jared meets with and soon gets to know B personally. Although B immediately understands that Jared is a potential threat to himself and his movement, he does not seem to be as suspicious of or cold toward Jared as are the rest of B's cohort, including B's closest companion, the extremely distrusting, lupus-stricken Shirin. Instead, B welcomes Jared and seems legitimately motivated to educate him, even presenting his teachings to Jared one-on-one. Among the tenets of B's philosophy are: an advocacy of new tribalism and the "Great Remembering"—which is his idea humanity has forgotten its hunter-gatherer history and should reclaim this forgotten knowledge that once steadily supported humanity's survival—as well as an opposition to "totalitarian agriculture," the style of agriculture whereby its practitioners destroy all competition and assume all resources are made only for their own use. Jared finds himself logically supporting these and others of B's ideas, though is unable to rationalize them in terms of his religious convictions.
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