The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill- for APPSCJL DL

Context/Background

The Hairy Ape is a 1922 expressionist play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It is about a beastly, unthinking laborer known as Yank, the protagonist of the play, as he searches for a sense of belonging in a world controlled by the rich. At first, Yank feels secure as he stokes the engines of an ocean liner, and is highly confident in his physical power over the ship's engines and his men.

However, when the rich daughter of an industrialist in the steel business refers to him as a "filthy beast", Yank undergoes a crisis of identity and so starts his mental and physical deterioration. He leaves the ship and wanders into Manhattan, only to find he does not belong anywhere—neither with the socialites on Fifth Avenue, nor with the labor organizers on the waterfront. In a fight for social belonging, Yank's mental state disintegrates into animalistic, and in the end, he is defeated by an ape in which Yank's character has been reflected. The Hairy Ape is a portrayal of the impact industrialization and social class has on the dynamic character Yank.

Plot

The play is divided into eight scenes.

Scene 1:

In the firemen's forecastle of a cruise ship that has just sailed from New York for a trip across the Atlantic Ocean. Off-duty men are talking and singing drunkenly. Yank, portrayed as a leader among the men, is confident in his strength to fuel the machinery of the ship and the world. He shows particular contempt toward two other firemen: Long, an Englishman with socialist leanings, and Paddy, an old Irishman who reflects wistfully on the days of wind-powered sailing ships.

Scene 2:

Mildred Douglas (a steel tycoon's daughter) and her aunt are talking above deck on the ship whilst sunbathing. They argue over Mildred's desire to do social work, ending only when two officers come to escort her below decks for her planned visit to the ship's stokehole. Her aunt does not understand why Mildred desires to help the poor. She ends up going below deck regardless.

Scene 3:

In the stokehole, Yank and the other firemen take pride in their daily work. Yank does not notice Mildred when she enters, and instead shouts threats toward the unseen engineer ordering the men to keep coaling the engines. The men stop to turn when she enters. Confused as to why they have stopped working, he turns to see Mildred; she is so shocked by his attitude and appearance that she calls him a filthy beast and faints.

Scene 4:

In the firemen's forecastle yet again. Yank is mulling over the incident in the stokehole. The other men try to understand his fury by questioning him and asking if he is in love. Yank is infuriated at Mildred for claiming that he resembles a hairy ape. He becomes enraged and tries to charge after Mildred in revenge. However, his men wrestle him to the ground before he can even reach the door.

Scene 5:

On Fifth Avenue in New York three weeks later, after the ship has returned from its cruise. Yank and Long argue over how best to attack the upper class while admiring how clean the city is. Still obsessed with avenging himself against Mildred, Yank rudely accosts several churchgoers who come out into the streets as Long flees the scene. Yank punches a gentleman in the face and is arrested shortly thereafter.

Scene 6:

The following night at the prison on Blackwell's Island, Yank has begun serving a 30-day sentence. Seeing the prison as a zoo, he tells the other inmates of how he wound up there. One of them tells him about the Industrial Workers of the World and suggests that he think about joining. Enraged by the thought of Mildred and her father again, Yank starts to bend the bars of his cell in an attempt to escape, but the guards retaliate in force.

Scene 7:

A month later, Yank visits the local IWW office upon his release from prison and joins the group. The local members are happy to have him in their ranks at first because not many ship's firemen have joined. However, when he expresses his desire to blow up the Steel Trust, they suspect him of working for the government and throw him out. In the streets, Yank comes in contact with a policeman, who shows no interest in arresting him and tells him to move along.

Scene 8:

The following evening, Yank visits the zoo. He sympathizes with a gorilla, thinking they are one and the same. He releases the animal from his cage and approaches it to introduce himself as if they were friends. The gorilla attacks Yank, fatally crushing his ribs, and throws him into the cage where he dies.

Existentialism

 

Brief Summary

The Hairy Ape opens in the firemen’s forecastle of a large ocean liner, where Yank and his coworkers spend their time when they’re not shoveling coal into the boat’s furnaces. The room is loud and rowdy, the many stokers drinking, singing, and shouting. Amidst the uproar, Yank sits and listens to his fellow stokers. He is the “most highly developed individual” in the cage-like forecastle, where the men resemble Neanderthals. The stokers get louder until, finally, Yank tells them to be quiet because he’s trying to “think”—an idea that makes all of them laugh. Nonetheless, everyone heeds him for a moment, but soon they’re back to their chattering. One stoker belts out a song about a woman waiting for him at home, a sentiment Yank scorns. He goes on to say that the only home these men have is the ship itself.

Hearing Yank’s speech about home, a drunken stoker named Long stands up and expresses a number of communist values, describing the ship as “hell,” and saying, “All men is born free and ekal.” Continuing in this manner, Long says that the “Capitalist clarss” has made the stokers into “wage slaves,” but Yank tells him to be quiet, calling his ideas nothing but “Salvation Army-Socialist bull.” Instead of agreeing with Long’s critique of the inequity that arises under capitalism, he insists that the work he and his fellow stokers do in the engine room has nothing to do with the rich people in the first cabin. Indeed, he upholds that rich people aren’t strong or brave enough to work as stokers, arguing that only true men have enough “noive” (nerve) to work in the hell that is the stokehole. This, he says, is where he “belongs.”

“We belong to this, you’re saying?” says a stoker named Paddy, an older Irishman. Paddy disagrees with Yank and waxes poetic about the past, when he used to sail above deck on beautiful ships with the wind in his face. Arguing that this kind of work was hard but rewarding, Paddy frames the stokehole as exploitative and unfulfilling. Yank responds harshly to Paddy’s ideas, calling him “crazy” and moving toward him violently, though he backs off and decides he doesn’t deserve a beating because he’s “too old” to understand what it means to work in the stokehole. “I belong and he don’t,” Yank says to his coworkers, insisting that Paddy has lost his nerve. Yank then says that he likes being at the “bottom” of the entire world, since he thinks his job is what makes everything run. “I’m de end! I’m de start! I start somep’n and de woild moves!” he says.

Two days later, Mildred—the daughter of a steel tycoon—sits above deck with her aunt and looks out at the sea. The two women talk about Mildred’s desire to see how “the other half lives.” Her aunt criticizes her for wanting to help the poor in ways that only make them feel “poorer,” but Mildred pays no heed, instead insisting that she’s only trying to “be some use in this world.” She says she’d like to be “sincere” for once, though she doesn’t know if it’s possible. She then posits that the wealth she has inherited has left her with “none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.” In search of this kind of “energy,” she has decided to take a tour of the engine room. Her aunt is incredulous, but Mildred is set on seeing the stokehole. She even told the captain—who didn’t want to let her do this—that her father is president of Nazareth Steel and owns the ocean liner, and so he had no choice but to let her do what she wants. When an engineer finally comes to escort her below, he urges her to change because she’s wearing a white dress. He tells her she’s sure to rub against grease on their way down, but she only says, “It doesn’t matter. I have lots of white dresses.”

In the stokehole, the men are busy shoveling coal into the furnaces in intervals marked by the sound of a whistle, which an engineer blows from an unseen perch above. When the whistle blows, they throw open the furnaces and are blasted with heat, which is why they need frequent breaks. Although most of the men complain that the engineer blows the whistle too quickly, Yank criticizes them for being weak, urging them along until, finally, he too becomes angry. Before long, he turns around and screams into the darkness, the shovel raised over his head as he yells violent threats at the engineer with the whistle. At this point, he notices that his fellow stokers are all looking at something behind him, so he whirls around and crouches with the shovel held above his head. What he finds is Mildred standing there in her white dress, staring at him; “As she looks at his gorilla face, as his eyes bore into hers, she utters a low, choking cry and shrinks away from him, putting both hands up before her eyes to shut out the sight of his face, to protect her own,” reads O’Neill’s stage direction. “Take me away!” she shrieks. “Oh, the filthy beast!” With this, she faints, and the engineers at her side carry her away. As he watches her go, Yank “feels himself insulted in some unknown fashion in the very heart of his pride,” and says, “God damn yuh!”

Back in the forecastle, Yank sits in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker” while the other stokers speak loudly. Once again, he tells them to be quiet because he’s trying to think, and as they try to guess what’s going on with him, Paddy suggests he’s fallen in love. “I’ve fallen in hate, get me?” Yank says. Long gets up and insists that Mildred’s presence in the stokehole only further emphasizes the divide between the “Capitalist clarss” and the workers, and he tries to get Yank to see that they can—“as voters and citizens”—make a difference if only they finally unite. Agreeing with Long, Paddy says that it was as if Mildred had “seen a great hairy ape escaped from the Zoo.” Hearing this, Yank vows to take his revenge.

Three weeks later, Long takes Yank to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. “We’re trespassers ’ere,” Long explains. Proletarians keep orf the grass!” Failing to grasp that he most likely won’t be able to find Mildred herself, Yank grows impatient, but Long tells him to wait until church lets out, at which point rich people stream over the sidewalks. Giving up on the idea of finding Mildred, Yank tries to pick fights with wealthy passersby, but nobody even acknowledges him, and Long decides to go home because he knows Yank is going to get them in trouble. Finally, after accosting multiple people, Yank slams into a wealthy gentleman. The man calls for help and “a whole platoon of policemen rush in on Yank from all sides.”

In jail the following night, Yank sits in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker” and likens his cell to the cages that animals are kept in at the zoo. His fellow prisoners hear him say this and they make fun of him. He then tells them about Mildred, explaining that she’s the daughter of a wealthy man. A man in the nearest cell suggests that Yank “join the Wobblies” if he wants to find Mildred. When Yank expresses his confusion, this prisoner reads him a newspaper article about the Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW). The article is from a speech made by a senator who publicly warned the senate about the “wobblies.” Quoting the newspaper, the prisoner reads, “They plot with fire in one hand and dynamite in the other. They stop not before murder to gain their ends.” Although the senator meant these words metaphorically, Yank takes the ideas literally and decides to join the IWW when he gets out of prison, thinking this will help him get back at Mildred and her family. In a determined rage, he starts shaking the bars of his cell, and when a guard comes to tell him to stop, he rips the cage apart. Frantically, the guard yells for backup and sprays a hose into the cell as the curtain closes.

A month later, Yank visits an IWW branch and asks if he can join. The secretary who works inside gives him pamphlets and welcomes him in a friendly manner. However, Yank keeps alluding to the idea that the IWW has secret schemes to blow up companies like Nazareth Steel, and this aggravates the secretary, who orders the men hanging around the office to throw Yank out. Sitting in the street outside, Yank says, “So demboids don’t tink I belong, neider.”

The next day, Yank goes to the Zoo and talks to a gorilla about how he doesn’t “belong” anywhere. “Yuh get me,” he says, accepting the idea that he is the “hairy ape” Mildred thinks he is. He tells the gorilla he will let him free, saying that they can stick together and wreak havoc on the people who want to put them both in cages. When he lets the gorilla out, though, the animal squeezes him so hard that his back snaps, and then the large creature tosses him into the cage. “Even him didn’t tink I belonged,” Yank says. With his dying breath, he says, “Ladies and gents, step forward and take a slant at de one and only—one and original—Hairy Ape from de wilds of—” With this, he dies as the monkeys in the surrounding cages start “chattering.”

 

Scene wise analysis

Scene-I

A cacophony of sound swirls through the firemen’s forecastle of an ocean liner making its way from New York City to England. Inside the forecastle there is a horde of laborers, all of whom work below deck as stokers (people who shovel coal into furnaces to power steam engines). The room they occupy is full of bunks and steel, with a ceiling so low that the men are forced to hunch over—a position that “accentuates the natural stooping posture which shoveling coal and the resultant over-development of back and shoulder muscles have given them.” In fact, these men look like “Neanderthal[s],” their chests hairy, their arms enormous and strong, their brows low, and their eyes “small, fierce,” and “resentful.” As the stokers shout and sing and grunt, Yank sits by himself. He is stronger than his coworkers, who see him as “their most highly developed individual.”

The stokers yell about drinking and aggressively challenge one another to fights, but Yank tells them to “Choke off dat noise,” demanding that somebody bring him a bottle of liquor. With this, multiple men rush forward to offer alcohol. The men then encourage an “old, wizened Irishman” named Paddy to sing. Paddy has an “extremely monkey-like” face and is exceedingly drunk, though the Irishman insists that he’ll always be able to sing and promptly launches into an old sailor’s song. “Aw hell!” Yank shouts. “Nix on dat old sailing ship stuff!  All dat bull’s dead, see? And you’re dead, too, yuh damned old Harp, on’y yuh don’t know it. Take it easy, see. Give us a rest. Nix on de loud noise. Can’t youse see I’m tryin’ to t’ink?” In response, the group of stokers laugh loudly, repeating the word, “Think!” and telling Yank not to strain himself.

As another stoker launches into an old song about a loved one waiting for him at home, Yank cuts him off, telling him to shut up and criticizing him for romanticizing the idea of home. “Home?” he asks. “Home, hell! I’ll make a home for yuh! I’ll knock yuh dead. Home!  T’hellwit home! Where d’yuh get dat tripe? Dis is home, see?” Yank goes on to say that he ran away from his home when he was only a child because his father used to beat him. “But yuh can bet your shoit no one ain’t never licked me since!” he declares. “Wanter try it, any of youse?”

Agreeing with Yank’s idea of the ship as a home, a stoker named Long jumps up and drunkenly says, “Listen ’ere, Comrades! Yank ’ere is right. ’E says this ’ere stinkin’ ship is our ’ome. And ’e says as ’ome is ’ell. And ’e’s right! This is ’ell. We lives in ’ell,—Comrades—and right enough we’ll die in it.” Shouting furiously, Long points out that it’s not the stokers’ fault that they have to live in such misery. “We wasn’t born this rotten way,” he says, adding that men are born free and equal in the Bible but the “lazy, bloated swine” in the first cabin have forced them down. Now, they’re only “slaves in the bowels of a bloody ship, sweatin’, burnin’ up, eatin’ coal dust!” They aren’t to blame for their situation instead, it’s “the damned Capitalist clarss!”

Along with his fellow stokers, Yank tells Long to be quiet, saying that he’ll “knock” him down if he doesn’t shut up. “De Bible, huh?” he says. “De Cap’tlist class, huh? Aw nix on dat Salvation Army-Socialist bull.” He tells Long that he’s “listened to lots of guys” like him before and that he has determined they’re all “wrong” and cowardly (or “yellow”) to boot. He insists that they’re better men than “dem slobs in de foist cabin,” adding that a single stoker could easily “clean up de whole mob wit one mitt.” One first cabin man wouldn’t last one watch in the stokehole, he continues; “Dey’d carry him off on a stretcher.” Concluding, he says, “We belong and dey don’t.”

Having listened to Yank’s ideas about “belonging” in the stokehole, Paddy says that if they’re so important to the ship, then “that Almighty God have pity on us!” He wishes “to be back in the fine days of [his] youth,” when beautiful ships were manned by “fine strong men […] men that was sons of the sea as if ’twas the mother that bore them.” Reminiscing about his days before working on the ocean liner, Paddy waxes poetic about toiling beneath the sun with the wind in his face and clean men all around him, insisting that back then he and his mates were “free men.” “Work—aye, hard work—but who’d mind that at all?” he says. “Sure, you worked under the sky and ’twas work wid skill and daring to it.”

As he speaks, Paddy sees he isn’t getting through to Yank. “’Twas them days a ship was part of the sea,” he says, “and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one. Is it one wid this you’d be, Yank—black smoke from the funnels smudging the sea, smudging the decks—the bloody engines pounding and throbbing and shaking—widdivil a sight of sun or a breath of clean air—choking our lungs wid coal dust—breaking our backs and hearts in the hell of the stokehole—feeding the bloody furnace—feeding our lives along wid the coal, I’m thinking—caged in by steel from a sight of the sky like bloody apes in the Zoo!” Laughing at this idea, Paddy asks if Yank wants to be a “flesh and blood wheel of the engines.”

Paddy’s words have no effect on Yank, and so he resignedly says that he hopes a large wave will take him overboard someday soon. For a moment, Yank comes at him as if to hurt him, but then he stops and admits that Paddy is “aw right,” suggesting that the old Irishman has simply grown “too old” to work in the stokehole. Turning to the other stokers, Yank says, “I belong and he don’t. He’s dead but I’m livin’. Listen to me! Sure I’m part of de engines! Why de hell not! Dey move, don’t dey? Dey’re speed, ain’tdey! Dey smash trou, don’t dey? Twenty-five knots a hour! Dat’s goin’ some! Dat’s new stuff! Dat belongs! But him, he’s too old.” Going on, he insists that he is the lifeblood of the engine room, saying that he’s what makes everything move.

“Hell in de stokehole?” Yank asks. “Sure! It takes a man to work in hell. Hell, sure, dat’s my fav’rite climate. I eat it up! I git fat on it! It’s me makes it hot! It’s me makes it roar! It’s me makes it move!” Going on, he says that people like him are what make engines run, and engines are what make the world run, meaning that he himself is what keeps everything moving forward. “I’m de end! I’m de start! I start somep’n and de woild moves!” he brags. “It—dat’s me! de new dat’smoiderin’ de old! I’m de ting in coal dat makes in boin; I’m steam and oil for de engines.” He even says that he’s “steel,” which he claims is what “stands for de whole ting.”

Yank scoffs at the idea that he and his fellow stokers are “slaves.” Instead, he maintains that they “run de whole woiks.” As he speaks, Paddy sips begrudgingly from the bottle, as if trying to drink himself into a stupor. As Yank finishes his speech, Paddy starts to sing an old folk song called “Miller of Dee,” belting out: “I care for nobody, no, not I, / And nobody cares for me.” Hearing this, Yank says, “Now yuh’re getting’ wise to somep’n. Care for nobody, dat’s de dope! To hell wit ’em all! And nix on nobody else carin’. I kin care for myself, get me!”

At this point, bells in the forecastle ring, signaling to the stokers that it’s time for them to return to the engine room. However, Paddy refuses to leave, saying that he’ll stay sitting in the forecastle “drinking” and “thinking” and “dreaming dreams.” On his way out, Yank turns around and says, “Tinkin’ and dreamin’, what’ll that get yuh? What’s tinkin’ got to do wit it? We move, don’t we? Speed, ain’t it?”

Scene-II

Two days later, Mildred Douglas—the wealthy daughter of a steel tycoon—sits above deck with her aunt. She is “slender” and “delicate” with “a pale, pretty face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful superiority.” In line with this, she is “nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia.” Her aunt, on the other hand, is “pompous and proud,” though she sits like a “gray lump of dough touched up with rouge” while Mildred herself looks like “the vitality of her stock [was] sapped before she was conceived, so that she is the expression not of its life energy but merely of the artificialities that energy ha[s] won for itself in the spending.”

Looking out over the ocean, Mildred comments on the “black smoke” coming from the ocean liner, suggesting that it looks “beautiful” as it “swirls back against the sky.” Her aunt, however, says that she “dislikes smoke of any kind.” As the two women argue with one another, it becomes clear that they aren’t on good terms—a notion made all the more apparent when Mildred says, “I detest you, Aunt. Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum table cloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome.” Her aunt hardly pays attention to this insult, suggesting that they try to make a “truce” since she has to accompany Mildred to England as her chaperone.

Mildred’s aunt criticizes her for seeking “morbid thrills” by working with the poor. “How they must have hated you, by the way,” she says, “the poor that you made so much poorer in their own eyes!” Now, she says, Mildred is taking her “slumming” abroad to the London district of Whitechapel. “Please do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives,” Mildred says. “Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at least. I would like to help them. I would like to be some use in the world. Is it my fault I don’t know how?”

Going on, Mildred says that she wants to be “sincere” and that she’d like to “touch life somewhere,” though she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to do this. “I’m afraid I have neither the vitality nor the integrity,” she admits. “All that was burnt out in our stock before I was born. Grandfather’s blast furnaces, flaming to the sky, melting steel, making millions—then father keeping those home fires burning, making more millions—and little me at the tail-end of it all. I’m a waste product in the Bessemer process—like the millions. Or rather, I inherit the acquired trait of the byproduct, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.”

Mildred’s aunt mocks her for trying to be “sincere,” saying she ought to be “artificial,” since this would be more “sincere” than anything else she might do. In response, Mildred says she glad she’ll soon be going down to the stokehole. Hearing this, her aunt is quite upset, refusing to believe that she’ll actually go through with her idea to see “how the other half lives.” Nonetheless, Mildred tells her that she convinced the captain and the chief engineer to let her go down. “Oh, they didn’t want to at first,” she says, “in spite of my social service credentials. They didn’t seem a bit anxious that I should investigate how the other half lives and works on a ship. So I had to tell them that my father, the president of Nazareth Steel, chairman of the board of directors of this line, had told me it would be all right.”

When the Second Engineer comes to fetch Mildred, he tries to make small talk while waiting for another engineer to accompany them into the stokehole. He says that it’s nice and hot in the sun, but Mildred says, “Not hot enough for me. I don’t like Nature. I was never athletic.” Smiling, the engineer says, “Well, you’ll find it hot enough where you’re going.” In response, Mildred says, “Do you mean hell?” Beside himself, the engineer forces an awkward laugh and says, “Ho-ho! No, I mean the stokehole.” He then suggests that Mildred change out of her white dress because she’s sure to rub against grease on her way down the many ladders and pathways leading to the stokehole, but Mildred refuses, saying that she has “plenty of white dresses.” As Mildred follows the engineer, her aunt calls after her, calling her a “poser.”

Scene-III

In the stokehole, the stokers stand before the furnaces. Whenever a whistle sounds from high above—issued in the darkness by an unseen engineer—they throw open the furnace doors and are hit with the staggering heat of the coal fires. For a short interval, they throw coal by the shovelful into furnaces and then close the doors, at which point they take a small break and wait for the next whistle. Paddy—who apparently left the forecastle after all—complains about the difficult work, saying that he is “destroyed entirely,” but Yank chastises him for this attitude, saying that he might as well lie down and die. At this point, the engineer’s whistle sounds, and Yank urges his fellow stokers to get back to shoveling, saying, “Come on, youse guys! Git into de game! She’s gittin’ hungry!”

As he shovels, Yank speaks admiringly about the power of the coal, taking pleasure in the idea that he’s causing the ship to move at amazing speeds. When they finally slam the furnace doors closed for another break, Paddy once again complains, and the engineer blows the whistle after hardly any time at all. Shaking his fist into the darkness, Yank says, “Take it easy dere, you! Who d’yuhtinksrunnin’ dis game, me or you? When I git ready, we move. Not before!” Hearing this, his coworkers cheer him on, and he says, “He ain’t got no noive. He’s yellow, get me? All de engineers is yellow.” Disparaging the engineers in this way, he turns around and opens the furnace doors, flinging coal into the “blazing heat.” As he does so, Mildred comes down with the engineers, still clad in her perfect white dress.

Mildred stands directly behind Yank, but he doesn’t see her. Even as he stoops to get a new shovelful of coal, the engineer blows the whistle again, sending Yank into a blind rage while the rest of the men halt and stare at Mildred (which is the reason the engineer has blown the whistle in the first place). “Toin off dat whistle!” Yank howls with his shovel raised over his head and his free hand beating his chest in a “gorilla-like” fashion. Going on like this, his anger mounts and mounts, until he finally says, “I’ll slam yer nose trou de back of yer head! I’ll cut yer guts out for a nickel, yuh lousy boob, yuh dirty, crummy, muck-eatin’ son of a—” Suddenly, he realizes that the other stokers are staring at something behind him, so he whirls around and strikes a violent pose.

Ready to kill the engineer he thinks is behind him, Yank is astounded to see Mildred standing there in her white dress. She appears to him “like a white apparition in the full light from the open furnace doors.” As she stares at him, she is horrified by his “gorilla face” and his “small eyes,” which are “gleaming ferociously.” Letting out a scream, Mildred shields her face. “Take me away!” she says, backing into the engineers. “Oh, the filthy beast!” Having said this, she faints, and the engineers rush her out of the stokehole. As she retreats, Yank becomes enraged once more, feeling himself “insulted in some unknown fashion in the very heart of his pride.” “God damn yuh!” he yells, throwing his shovel at the door through which Mildred has just disappeared. As it falls to the floor, the whistle sounds again from overhead.

Scene-IV

Back in the forecastle, Yank and his coworkers have just come back from dinner. Everyone except Yank has washed the dirt and coal dust from their faces, so that now he stands out as a “blackened, brooding figure.” As the stokers yell raucously amongst themselves, Yank sits by himself in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” and his peers talk about how he didn’t eat anything at dinner or wash his face. “Aw say, youse guys, Lemme alone. Can’t youse see I’m tryin’ to tink?” he says, at which point everybody laughs and repeats the word, “Think!” “Yes, tink!” he replies. “Tink, dat’s what I said! What about it!”

Slyly, Paddy suggests that he knows what’s bothering Yank. “’Tis aisy to see. He’s fallen in love, I’m telling you,” he says. Once again, the stokers laugh and repeat the word, saying, “Love!” Yank corrects Paddy by saying that he’s fallen in “hate,” not love. “’Twould take a wise man to tell one from the other,” Paddy remarks. “But I’m telling you it’s love that’s in it. Sure what else but love for us poor bastes in the stokehole would be bringing a fine lady, dressed like a white quane, down a mile of ladders and steps to be havin’ a look at us?” This elicits howls of anger from the stokers, and Long jumps onto a bench and says. “Hinsultin’ us! Hinsultin’ us, the bloody cow! And them bloody engineers! What right ’as they got to be exhibitin’ us ’s if we wasbleedin’ monkeys in a menagerie?”

Inciting anger amongst his peers, Long says that he knows why Mildred came down to the stokehole. “I arsked a deck steward ’o she was and ’e told me. ’Er old man’s a bleedin’ millionaire, a bloody Capitalist!” Going on, Long says that Mildred’s father makes half the steel in the world and owns the ocean liner. “And you and me, Comrades, we’re ’is slaves!” he adds. Hardly believing his ears, Yank asks if this is true, and Long confirms that it is and asks what Yank’s going to do about it. “Are we got terswaller ’er hinsults like dogs?” he asks. “It ain’t in the ship’s articles. I tell yer we got a case. We kin go to law—” Interrupting Long, Yank scoffs at this idea, saying, “Hell! Law!” Echoing this sentiment, the other stokers laugh and repeat him, saying, “Law!”

Long insists that he and his coworkers have rights as “voters and citizens,” but the stokers only disparage these thoughts, so he says, “We’re free and equal in the sight of God.” To this, Yank says, “Hell! God!” Once again, the stokers repeat him with cynical delight until Longbacks away and Paddy continues as if he hasn’t been interrupted, saying, “And there she was standing behind us, and the Second pointing at us like a man you’d hear in a circus would be saying: In this cage is a queerer kind of baboon than ever you’d find in darkest Africy. We roast them in their own sweat—and be damned if you won’t hear some of thim saying they like it!” Saying this, he glances accusingly at Yank and says that Mildred looked at him “as if she’d seen a great hairy ape escaped from the Zoo.”

“I’ll brain her!” Yank yells, “I’ll brain her yet, wait ’n’ see!” He then slowly walks toward Paddy and says, “Say, is dat what she called me—a hairy ape?” In response, Paddy tells him, “She looked it at you if she didn’t say the word itself,” and this prompts Yank to state for all to hear that he will take his revenge on Mildred. “I’ll show her I’m better’n her, if she on’y knew it,” he says. “I belong and she don’t, see! I move and she’s dead!” He then vows to “fix” her if he sees her again, but Paddy assures him she won’t return to the stokehole, so he rushes toward the door, saying he’ll go above deck and “bust de face offen her.” At this point, his fellow stokers pile atop him, stopping him from leaving the forecastle and getting murdered.

Scene-V

Long takes Yank to Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan three weeks later. The streets are clean and empty, as everybody is at church. Unlike Long, who has cleaned his face and is dressed in “shore clothes,” Yank is still in his filthy work clothes and hasn’t shaved or fully washed away the dirt around his eyes. “Well,” Long says, “’ere we are. Fif’ Avenoo. This ’ere’s their bleedin’ private lane, as yer might say. We’re trespassers ’ere. Proletarians keep orf the grass!” Looking down, Yank notes that he doesn’t see any grass, though he does point out that the sidewalk’s so clean “yuh could eat a fried egg offen it.”  He then impatiently asks where all the people like Mildred are, and Long tells him they’re in church.

Yank says that he used to go to church as a kid, since his parents made him, though they never went themselves. He tells Long that his parents used to fight with one another quite frequently, getting drunk and tearing up the entire house with their violence. When his mother died, he says, he ran away and started working as a stoker. “I ain’t never seen dis before,” he says, referring to Fifth Avenue. “De Brooklyn waterfront, dat was where I was dragged up. Dis ain’t so bad at dat, huh?” he says. In response, Long says, “Not bad? Well, we pays for it wiv our bloody sweat, if yer wants to know!”

Yank grows impatient because he doesn’t see anyone who looks like Mildred, but Long tells him to wait. I don’t wait for no one,” Yank replies. “I keep on de move.” To convince him to stay, Long reminds him that he wants to get back at Mildred, and Yank recounts how he tried to catch up with her once the ocean liner reached shore. Sneaking onto the dock, he waited for her so that he could spit in her face, but a group of police officers saw him and forced him to leave. “Yer been lookin’ at this ’ere ’ole affair wrong,” Long says. “Yer been actin’ an’ talkin’ ’s if it was all a bleedin’ personal matter between yer and that bloody cow. I wants to convince yer she was on’y a representative of ’er clarss. I wants to awaken yer bloody clarss consciousness.”

As Long and Yank wait for church to let out, they look into the windows of nearby storefronts and marvel at the opulent goods displayed therein. Long, for his part, is appalled by the diamonds they see in a jeweler’s window, saying that one of the rocks could feed an entire family for a year. Yank, on the other hand, is uninterested in this kind of talk, saying, “Aw, cut de sob stuff!” He then says, “Say, dem tings is pretty, huh?” Adding to this sentiment, he upholds that such things “don’t count,” so Long takes him to the window of a furrier and says, “And I s’pose this ’ere don’t count neither—skins of poor, ’armless animals slaughtered so as ’er and ’ers can keep their bleedin noses warm!”

Looking into the furrier’s, Yank is startled to find a monkey fur coat selling for $2,000. “It’s straight enuf,” Long assures him when he asks if the coat really costs that much. “They wouldn’t bloody well pay that for a ’airy ape’s skin—no, nor for the ’ole livin’ ape with all ’is ’ead, and body, and soul thrown in!” he tells Yank, who is suddenly enraged. “Trowin’ it up in my face!” Yank yells. “Christ! I’ll fix her!”

When church finally lets out, the streets fill with wealthy people. Sensing that Yank is about to become aggressive, Long says, “Easy goes, Comrade. Keep yerbloomin’ temper. Remember force defeats itself. It ain’t our weapon. We must impress our demands through peaceful means—the votes of the on-marching proletarians of the bloody world!” Yank can’t believe his ears, saying that voting is a “joke.” Calling Long “yellow,” he asserts that he himself is nothing but pure “force.” As he says this, he tries to put himself in the way as rich people pass him, but no one even acknowledges his presence. “Say, who d’yuhtinkyuh’rebumpin’?” he says when someone brushes by him. Insisting that the police will soon descend upon them, Long says this isn’t what he had in mind. “And whatever ’appens, yer can’t blame me,” he adds as he leaves.

After Long leaves, Yank tries to pick fights with the wealthy people, yelling that they “don’t belong.” “See dat building goin’ up dere?” he says. “See de steel work? Steel, dat’s me! Youse guys live on it and tinkyuh’resomep’n. But I’m in it, see!” Paying no attention, a group crowds around the furrier’s shop, as one woman gasps, “Monkey fur!” in admiration. Enraged, Yank tries to rip a lamppost from the sidewalk, and as he does so, a rich man runs into him while chasing a bus. “At last!” Yank says, punching the man in the face with all his strength. Nonetheless, “the gentleman stands unmoved as if nothing ha[s] happened,” and says, “I beg your pardon. You have made me lose my bus.” With this, the man calls out for the police, and “a whole platoon” suddenly descends upon Yank and beats him to the ground.

Scene-VI

The following night, Yank sits in a jail cell in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” His bruised face is framed by a “blood-stained bandage” wrapped around his head, and as he looks at the bars of the cell, he says, “Steel. Dis is de Zoo, huh?” This statement elicits laughter from a number of unseen prisoners in neighboring cells, who all make fun of Yank for thinking the jail is the zoo. “I musta been dreamin’. I tought I was in a cage at de Zoo,” he says. “But de apes don’t talk, do dey?” The other prisoners then ask him who he is, urging him to tell them his story. “I was a fireman,” he says, “stokin’ on de liners. I’m a hairy ape, get me? And I’ll bust youse all in de jaw if yuh don’t lay off kiddin’ me.”

After the other prisoners shout back at Yank for threatening them, one of them tells everybody to calm down and again asks Yank why he’s in jail. “Sure, I’ll tell youse,” Yank says. “Sure! Why de hell not? On’y—youse won’t get me. Nobody gets me but me, see? I started to tell de Judge and all he says was: ‘Toity days to tink it over.’ ’Tink it over! Christ, dat’s all I been doin’ for weeks!” Going on, he explains that he was trying to get even with Mildred. He describes her white dress and says that if he can’t find her specifically, he’ll “take it out on de gang she runs wit.” He tells the prisoners that Mildred’s father is a millionaire whose last name is Douglas. “Douglas?” says another inmate. “That’s the president of the Steel Trust, I bet.”

A prisoner in a nearby cell says, “Hey, feller, take a tip from me. If you want to get back at that dame, you better join the Wobblies.” By way of explanation, he tells Yank about this “gang of blokes” that he read about in the newspaper. “There’s a long spiel about ’em,” he says. “It’s from a speech made in the Senate.” Rummaging in his cell, he finds the paper and quotes the article, saying, “There is a menace existing in this country today which threatens the vitals of our fair republic—a foul menace against the very life-blood of the American Eagle […]. I refer to that devil’s brew of rascals, jailbirds, murderers and cutthroats who libel all honest working men by calling themselves the Industrial Workers of the World; but in the light of their nefarious plots, I call them the Industrious Wreckers of the World!”

“Wreckers, dat’s de right dope!” Yank says. “Dat belongs! Me for dem!” Pushing on, the nearby prisoner keeps reading the article, which upholds that the IWW “must be destroyed” because it threatens democracy. “They plot with fire in one hand and dynamite in the other,” he reads. “They stop not before murder to gain their ends […] They would tear down society, put the lowest scum in the scats of the mighty, turn Almighty God’s revealed plan for the world topsy-turvy, and make of our sweet and lovely civilization a shambles, a desolation where man, God’s masterpiece, would soon degenerate back to the ape!” Impressed, Yank says, “So dey blow up tings, do dey? Dey turn tings round, do dey?” The nearby prisoner then hands him the newspaper through the bars.

Reflecting upon what he’s just heard, Yank sits for a moment in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker” before jumping to his feet and muttering, “Sure—her old man—president of de Steel Trust—makes half de steel in de world—steel—where I tought I belonged—drivin’ trou—movin’—in dat—to make her—and cage me in for her to spit on! Christ. He made dis—dis cage!” His voice having grown to a shout, he begins to shake the bars so hard that the entire corridor of jail cells vibrates. “But I’ll drive trou!” he yells. “Fire, dat melts it! I’ll be fire—under de heap—fire dat never goes out—hot as hell—breakin’ out in de night.”

When Yank says the words “breakin’ out,” he lifts his feet off the ground and puts them against the bars, placing them right where his hands are so that he is “parallel to the floor like a monkey.” In this position, he pulls at the metal, which “bends like a licorice stick under his tremendous strength.” Having heard the incredible commotion, a guard rushes in with a large firehose and tells everybody to quiet down. “Hell, look at dat bar bended!” he shouts. Turning down the hall, he tells the other guards to turn on the hose, at which point a great rush of water sprays out and slaps the steel of Yank’s cell as the curtain closes.

Scene-VII

A month later, Yank visits an IWW office near the New York City waterfront. In his dirty clothes, he knocks on the door and waits as the secretary inside says, “What the hell is that—someone knocking? Come in, why don’t you?” When Yank doesn’t enter, the secretary tells one of the many men in the office to see who’s there. Once inside, Yank explains that he wants to become a member, and the secretary happily says he’ll file his card. “Glad to know you people are waking up at last. We haven’t got many members in your line,” he tells Yank. When he asks what Yank’s name is, Yank pauses, saying, “Lemme tink.” “Don’t you know your own name?” the secretary asks. “Sure,” Yank says, “but I been just Yank for so long—Bob, dat’s it—Bob Smith.”

The secretary writes Yank’s name on the membership card and welcomes him to the IWW, telling him to take some pamphlets to distribute to his fellow stokers. He then asks why Yank knocked when he first arrived, and Yank says that he thought there were a lot of police officers in the neighborhood and figured the organization would want to inspect any visitors through a peephole before letting them inside. “What have the cops got to do with us? We’re breaking no laws,” the secretary says. “Sure,” Yank says conspiratorially. “I’m wise to dat.” The secretary is confused by this, eventually saying, “It’s all plain and above board; still, some guys get a wrong slant on us. What’s your notion of the purpose of the IWW?” In response, Yank refuses to answer, saying he knows better than to speak out of turn.

After a tiresome back and forth about the nature of the IWW, Yank says, “Yuh wanter blow tings up, don’t yuh? Well, dat’s me! I belong!” In response, the secretary says, “You mean change the unequal conditions of society by legitimate direct action or with dynamite?” “Dynamite!” Yank answers. “Blow it offen de oith—steel—all de cages—all de factories, steamers, buildings, jails—de Steel Trust and all dat makes it go.” Subtly indicating to the surrounding men that they should grab Yank, the secretary asks Yank what specific job he wants to carry out, and Yank reveals that he wants to blow up Nazareth Steel.

Hearing Yank’s intentions, the men of the IWW grab him. Just before they throw him onto the streets, they ask the secretary if they should “put the boots to him.” “No,” the secretary responds. “He isn’t worth the trouble we’d get into. He’s too stupid.” He then walks over and laughs in Yank’s face, saying, “By God, this is the biggest joke they’ve put up on us yet. Hey, you Joke! Who sent you—Burns or Pinkerton? No, by God, you’re such a bonehead I’ll bet you’re in the Secret Service!” Going on, he tells Yank to return to whomever sent him and tell them that the IWW is a legitimate operation, but then he says, “Oh, hell, what’s the use of talking? You’re a brainless ape.”

After the IWW men throw Yank out of the office, he sits in the streets and assumes the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” “So demboids don’t tink I belong, neider.” Talking to himself, he scorns the way unions think about the world, saying that equal rights and better working conditions don’t mean anything. “What does dat get yuh?” he wonders aloud. “Dis ting’s in your inside, but it ain’t your belly. Feedin’ your face—sinkers and coffee—dat don’t touch it. It’s way down—at de bottom. Yuh can’t grab it, and yuh can’t stop it. It moves, and everything moves. It stops and de whole woild stops.” He then likens himself to a broken watch. “Steel was me,” he adds, “and I owned de woild. Now I ain’t steel, and de woild owns me.”

Hearing Yank talk to himself, a passing police officer tells him to get out of the street. “Sure!” Yank says. “Lock me up! Put me in a cage! Dat’s de on’y answer yuh know. G’wan, lock me up!” When the officer asks what Yank has done to deserve jailtime, Yank says, “Enuf to gimme life for! I was born, see? Sure, dat’s de charge.” Ignoring this, the officer accuses Yank of being drunk, but decides they’re too far from the station to make it worth walking him to a cell, so he simply tells Yank to get up and go elsewhere. “Say, where do I go from here?” Yank asks. Pushing him on his way, the officer grins and says, “Go to hell.”

Scene-VIII

The next evening, Yank makes his way to the “monkey house” at the Central Park Zoo. In the foremost cage sits an enormous gorilla, who is in the position of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” As Yank enters, “a chorus of angry chattering and screeching breaks out” from the many surrounding monkeys, though the gorilla barely looks up. Going to his cage, Yank begins to speak to him in a casual voice with “a deep undercurrent of sympathy,” saying that he’s a “hard-lookin’ guy.” As if he can understand, the gorilla stands and beats his chest. “Sure, I get yuh,” Yank says appreciatively. “Yuh challenge de whole woild, huh?” He then says that the gorilla understands what he’s saying even if he doesn’t quite understand the words themselves. “And why wouldn’t yuh get me?” he adds. “Ain’t we both members of de same club—de Hairy Apes?”

Looking at the gorilla, Yank considers the idea that this is what Mildred imagined when she saw him in the stokehole. “I was you to her, get me?” he says. “On’y outa de cage—broke out—free to moider her, see? […] She wasn’t wise dat I was in a cage, too—worser’n yours—sure—a damn sight—’cause you got some chanct to bust loose—but me—” Faltering for a moment, he grows confused and says, “Aw, hell! It’s all wrong, ain’t it?”

Frustrated that people like Mildred visit the zoo to gape at the gorilla, Yank hits the cage, which prompts the gorilla to shake the bars and roar alongside him. “Dat’s de way it hits me, too,” Yank says. “On’yyuh’re lucky, see? Yuh don’t’ belong wit ’em and yuh know it. But me, I belong wit ’em—but I don’t, see? Dey don’t belong wit me, dat’s what. Get me?” Pausing once again, he says, “Tinkin’ is hard.” Going on, he looks at the gorilla and says, “You belong! Sure! Yuh’re de on’y one in de woilddat does, yuh lucky stiff!” The gorilla roars at this, and Yank says, “Sure! Yuh get me.”

Maintaining that he and the gorilla belong to the same “club,” Yank decides to let the creature out of its cage. Asking the gorilla if he wants to “git even,” he says, “Dey’ll have to make de cages stronger after we’re trou!” With this, he opens the cage door and lets the gorilla out. Once the animal isn’t in its cage anymore, it looks at Yank, who holds out his hand for a handshake, but the gorilla takes him in his “huge arms” and squeezes him in a “murderous hug” that cracks his ribs. “The gorilla lets the crushed body slip to the floor,” O’Neill’s stage note reads, “stands over it uncertainly, considering; then picks it up, throws it in the cage, shuts the door, and shuffles off menacingly into the darkness at left.”

From the floor of the closed cage, Yank says, “Even him didn’t tink I belonged.” As the monkeys around him begin to screech, he desperately says, “Christ, where do I get off at? Where do I fit in?” Then, as if hearing himself, he decides to fight the pain and, standing up with his hands clutching the bars of the cage, forces a laugh. “Ladies and gents,” he says in a false tone, “step forward and take a slant at de one and only—one and original—Hairy Ape from de wilds of—” With this, he crumbles to the ground and dies. “The monkeys set up a chattering, whimpering wail,” writes O’Neill. “And, perhaps, the Hairy Ape at last belongs.”

 

 

 

CHARACTERS

Robert “Yank” Smith (Bob Smith)

The protagonist of the play, a stoker who works on a large ocean liner (ship). Shoveling coal day in and day out in the excruciating heat of the engine room has made Yank into a strong man who resembles a Neanderthal, with a low brow and “small, fierce, resentful eyes.” Yank is uneducated and devoted to his identity as an able-bodied worker. He is a leader among the other workers and finds himself rebelling against the authoritarian upper class he feels does not appreciate his hard work. In fact, he’s so committed to his life in the stokehole that he refuses to pay attention to the fact that his employers are exploiting his labor by paying him low wages. When Long and Paddy, two of his coworkers, try to point this out to him, he accuses them of not “belong[ing]” in the stokehole anymore, claiming that they’ve gone weak. However, when Mildred—the daughter of a steel tycoon who owns the ocean liner—visits the stokehole and calls Yank a “filthy beast,” he is so angry that his dedication to his identity as a competent worker isn’t enough to keep his frustration at bay. As such, he leaves the ocean liner and tries to find Mildred again so that he can take his revenge. However, this only takes him away from the only place where he was truly accepted, and so he finds himself feeling like he doesn’t “belong” anywhere. What’s worse, he’s too unintelligent to navigate his way through the world, so he misunderstands what’s happening around him, often violently lashing out because he thinks people are trying to harm him. Before long, he makes his way to the zoo, resigning himself to the idea that he is a “hairy ape”—an idea that Paddy originally suggested because of the way Mildred looked at him. Even so, there’s no changing the fact that he isn’t an ape. Unsurprisingly, then, a gorilla kills him when he—stupidly—lets it out of its cage.

Paddy

An aged ship worker. An experienced old Irishman who works alongside Yank on the ocean liner. Paddy is jaded and depressed about the miserable conditions of the stokehole (monotony of the work), frequently complaining about how wretched it is to work below deck. He is aware of the hierarchy of capitalist society. When Yank tries to convince his fellow stokers that the stokehole is their home, Paddy goes out of his way to emphasize how much better his life was before becoming an undervalued laborer. To drive his point home, he describes what it was like to sail above deck on beautiful boats, contrasting this liberating experience to the feeling of toiling for hours on end in front of the furnaces. After Mildred calls Yank a “filthy beast,” Paddy tells him that she looked at him as if he were a “hairy ape,” an idea that haunts Yank and inspires him to leave the ocean liner to take his revenge. He could be seen as symbolizing the voice of reason and disappears midway through the play as Yank begins his rebellious quest.

Long

Another stoker (ship worker) who accompanies Yank to Fifth Avenue where his initial act of rebelling against the upper class takes place. He tries to get Yank to see the nature of his own oppression under the rule of capitalism and industrialization. Long insists that the “Capitalist clarss” is to blame for the majority of the stokers’ problems, upholding that the people in the first cabin don’t care at all about the workers who are working as “wage slaves” to fuel the boat. Like Paddy, he challenges Yank’s unquestioning devotion to life as a stoker, though he uses a more political lens to do this. When Yank decides to leave the ocean liner to go looking for Mildred (to take his revenge), Long takes him to Fifth Avenue in New York City, hoping to impress upon his friend the class disparity plaguing their nation. To his credit, Long is only trying to urge Yank toward a point of political consciousness, but his attempt fails when it becomes clear that Yank is too preoccupied with his own vanity—his need to prove himself—to thoughtfully consider notions regarding the country’s socioeconomic divide. This is why Long winds up leaving Yank on the streets of Manhattan after seeing that his friend is only going to get them both into trouble.

Mildred Douglas

A young, wealthy socialite. The entitled daughter of the president of Nazareth Steel, a man who also serves as the chairman to the board of directors that controls the ocean liner upon which Yank, Paddy, and Long work. Mildred is traveling with her aunt from the United States to the United Kingdom to work with poor people—a hobby she has picked up over the years because she wants to “discover how the other half lives.” Mildred’s aunt thinks this is a ridiculous thing to do, but Mildred pays no heed to her, instead insisting that she must do this because it will help her “touch life” in a more “sincere” way than she ever has before. At the same time, she feels as if she’s a “waste product” of the process of making steel, which her grandfather perfected years ago. “Or rather,” she says, “I inherit the acquired trait of the byproduct, wealth, but none of the energy, none of the strength of the steel that made it.” Feeling as if she has no “energy” or “strength,” she has decided to push herself out of her comfort zone by taking a trip into the stokehole accompanied by several engineers. When the Second Engineer comes to fetch her, he tells her that she should change out of her white dress, but she ignores him. Once they finally descend, it is this white dress that catches the men so off-guard, though Yank himself doesn’t notice Mildred until he spins around after yelling curses at an unseen engineer. Seeing Yank with his shovel held over his head and his angry face, Mildred calls him a “filthy beast” and faints before the engineers carry her away.

Mildred’s Aunt

An old woman whom O’Neill describes as “pompous and proud.” Mildred’s aunt is highly critical of her niece, finding her desire to work with poor people utterly absurd. She isn’t afraid to voice her misgivings about Mildred, chastising the young woman for seeking “morbid thrills” and telling her that she might as well embrace the fact that she is “artificial” instead of trying to act “sincere.”

Second Engineer

A middle-aged engineer who works on the ocean liner. After Mildred convinces the captain of the ship to let her visit the stokehole, this man is charged with escorting her. Before they descend, he tries to tell her that her white dress will get dirty as they make their way down, but she refuses to change, saying that she has “lots of white dresses.”

The IWW Secretary

A secretary at the office of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union that Yank visits. At first, the secretary warmly welcomes Yank and gives him pamphlets explaining the ins and outs of the organization. However, Yank soon reveals that he’s joining the union because he mistakenly believes they will help him blow up Nazareth Steel. He dismisses Yank’s ideas of violent rebellion in favor of peaceful strikes and the passing out of pamphlets. When the secretary orders several IWW members to throw Yank out, they ask if they should beat him up, but the secretary says, “No. He isn’t worth the trouble we’d get into. He’s too stupid.” Just before the IWW members throw Yank out the door, the secretary adds, “You’re a brainless ape.”

Minor Characters

The Prisoner

An unnamed and unseen prisoner Yank meets in jail. This prisoner reads him a newspaper article about the Industrial Workers of the World union.

Gentleman

A member of the upper class. He calls the police because Yank causes him to miss a bus.

The Guard

Works at the prison where Yank is held after causing the Gentleman to miss his bus. The Guard shoots water at Yank when he bends the bars of his cell back.

Stokers/Firemen

Workers in the stokehole on the ocean liner, they seem to be sheep easily led by whoever is the strongest leader of the pack, usually Yank. They often tease other members of their crew in unison, which makes their voices take on a “brazen, metallic quality” as if their throats were gramophones.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Fifth Avenue

Citizens of the Upper Class, they are consumed by their own greed and materialism, completely blocking out anything that is not of their kind, like Yank. They only notice Yank when he becomes an obstacle to them living the life they are accustomed and are quick to remove him forcibly when this happens.