The One and Only Ivan Summary

The One and Only Ivan Summary

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Setting

The story takes place in a circus-themed shopping mall in the United States

Main Characters

Ivan – the protagonist of the novel, Ivan is a silverback gorilla who’s about 30 years old.

Ruby – Ruby is a baby elephant whom Mack purchases to try to reinvigorate the Big Top Mall’s daily shows.

Stella - Stella is an old elephant who is one of Ivan’s closest friends at the Big Top Mall.

Bob - Bob is a tiny stray dog who lives at the Big Top Mall.

Mack – he owns the Big Top Mall and all the animals in it.

Julia – she is George’s 10-year-old daughter. She accompanies him to the mall every night and either does homework or draws while he cleans.

George – he is the man who cleans the Big Top Mall every night.

Maya/The Woman – she is a woman who works with gorillas at the zoo.

Sara – she is George’s wife and Julia’s mother

Helen – she was Mack’s wife;

Snickers – he is a poodle who performs in shows at the Big Top Mall.

Tag – she was Ivan’s twin sister. She died in the crate on the way to the United States, after poachers killed Ivan’s mother and father.

Kalyani - Kinyani is a female gorilla who lives at the zoo where Ivan eventually ends up.

Plot Summary

Ivan introduces himself: he is a gorilla and has lived at the Big Top Mall and Video Arcade for the last 27 years. Fortunately, like all gorillas, Ivan is patient. While the other animals at the mall perform in three shows per day every day of the year, Ivan does not have to. He just has to be himself. However, Ivan is not totally sure who he is; the depiction of him on the billboard by the freeway shows Ivan as an angry, dangerous beast. In reality, Ivan is calm and peaceful. He lives in his "domain,” a cage made of glass and concrete so that people can look at him all the time.

Ivan spends his days eating and drawing pictures for the gift shop. In the evenings he listens to Julia, the custodian of George’s daughter, talk to him. She is an artist too, so they understand each other. Ivan also watches TV with Bob, a small stray dog who sleeps on Ivan’s belly every night. Though they mostly watch Westerns, Ivan once saw a gorilla on a nature program and that is the only reason he knows he is not the only gorilla on earth. Stella has also told Ivan that she believes he will see a real gorilla again someday, and Ivan believes her because she is old and wise. She used to work in a circus and only came to the mall after sustaining an injury to her foot. Her foot often bothers her and gets re-infected.

The Big Top Mall is experiencing financial difficulties since Ivan "is not cute anymore.” He is not attracting as many visitors as he used to. So the owner, Mack, purchases a baby elephant to attract more people to the mall. Stella is incensed by this turn of events. She has to coax the tiny baby out of the truck when she arrives, and she hurts her foot in the process. The baby’s name is Ruby, and Stella explains to Ivan that Ruby was born in the wild but just came to them from a circus. There, trainers chained all of Ruby’s feet to the floor for 23 hours per day to break her spirit.

Ruby proves to be curious and blunt. She tells Ivan that humans killed her parents and is impressed with Ivan’s drawing skills. As Ruby settles in, though, the infection in Stella’s foot gets worse. One evening, Stella is clearly ill and Julia begs George to call Mack for help. Mack insists that if Stella is not better in the morning, he will call the vet. But that night, after asking Ivan to promise to help Ruby get somewhere where she will be able to live a better life than she did, Stella dies. Ivan knows the promise will be impossible to keep.

Ivan does his best to comfort Ruby over the next few days. Since she loves stories, he agrees to tell her his story of his youth. He was born in a rainforest and had a twin sister, Tag. His name was Mud because, even then, he was an artist who drew with mud. Life was perfect, until people came, captured Ivan and Tag, and killed their parents. Tag died in the crate as they got further away from home. Mack adopted Ivan and raised him like a human for several years. It was not until Mack’s wife, Helen, left him that Mack finally brought Ivan to live at the mall. Ivan was thrilled to see his domain, there was nothing to break in it but he did not realize he would be here for so long.

A few days after Stella dies, Mack decides it is time to train Ruby to do tricks. He takes her into the ring and walks her in endless circles for hours. Not long after George and Julia arrive for George’s shift, Ruby, exhausted, sits and refuses to move. Mack loses his temper and threatens Ruby with a claw stick but Ruby hits Mack in the groin with her trunk. Julia and George return Ruby to her domain and, later, Julia gives Ivan some fingerprints.

Ruby has bad dreams and, when she wakes in the night, she asks if she is going to die in this domain like Stella. Ivan decides to tell her another story. In this one, a baby elephant needs to go to a zoo, "where humans make amends.” The elephant will get there because a friend of hers made a promise. That night, as Ruby and Bob sleep, Ivan remembers the rest of his story, how poachers cut off his mother and father’s hands, feet, and heads.

As Ivan looks at the billboard the next day, he realizes he knows how to help Ruby. He begins to paint every night with Julia’s finger paints and hides his paintings under the pool in his domain. He experiences a setback when Mack finds one painting and takes it to sell in the gift shop, though he also struggles to know exactly what to paint. But then, as Ivan and Bob watch TV, Ivan watches a commercial for the zoo. This shows Ivan the imagery he needs for his giant painting: the zoo enclosures and the zoo’s logo. He continues to paint every night and finally, one night, realizes the last thing his painting needs: the word "home.”

Finally, Ivan is ready to show Julia his work. He shoves his paintings out of the hole in his glass. At first, she does not understand. But when she tries to leave, Ivan beats his chest to get her attention, frightening her. Julia realizes that all of Ivan’s small pieces of painted paper fit together to make one big picture of Ruby at the zoo. She convinces George to help her put Ivan’s massive painting on the billboard.

Though Mack is enraged when he first sees the billboard, he soon is thrilled about the media attention. People come to see Ivan, even reporters. Finally, reporters with a big camera come and take videos of the dirty cages and the claw-stick. After the piece airs on the evening news, protesters begin to gather outside the mall every day, advocating for Ruby and Ivan to be moved to the zoo. After a man with a checklist comes to inspect the mall, Mack seems upset and days later, a woman from the zoo, Maya, arrives with a Ruby-sized box.

Not long after, more people arrive with more boxes, one of them Ivan-sized. The boxes sit overnight and that night when George arrives, he and Julia say goodbye but Julia says this is a good thing. Ivan and Ruby get in their boxes the next day, and a drink puts Ivan to sleep. When Ivan wakes up, he is in a clean glass cage. After a few days, Maya starts showing him videos on a TV of a gorilla family that does not have a silverback. A few days after that, she pulls aside a curtain on Ivan’s cage, and on the other side is the gorilla family Ivan has been watching on TV. Soon, Ivan is able to leave his cage and join the other gorillas. After a while, Ivan starts to feel like a silverback and he rediscovers his childhood love of painting with mud. Best of all, one day Maya shows him a video of Ruby, happy with the other elephants.

One evening, Julia and George come to the zoo with Bob hidden in Julia’s backpack. Bob now lives with their family to keep Julia’s mom Sara Company, and George is going to start a job at the zoo soon. Julia tells Ivan that Ivan did it, he saved Ruby.

Themes

1. Animal Abuse and Human Cruelty. The novel is the story of Ivan, a gorilla who has spent most of his life living in the Big Top Mall. There, Ivan lives with an elephant named Stella, a small stray dog named Bob, and a variety of other domestic and exotic animals that perform in three shows per day, every day of the year. Ivan can more or less ignore how unfulfilling and sad his life is in his tiny glass and cement "domain”; his word for his cage, that is, until the owner of the Big Top Mall, Mack, purchases a baby elephant named Ruby to add more life to the show and try to improve the mall’s financial situation. This marks the first time that Ivan has seen the painful techniques handlers use to train elephants to perform. Through this training, Stella’s death from neglect, and the other animals’ memories of cruel and abusive humans, the novel suggests that humans’ cruelty to animals stems from a belief that animals are fundamentally different from humans and don’t feel pain, fear, or betrayal the same way that people do, something that the novel shows could not be further from the truth.