Orientation

A fireman in the "stokehole" of an ocean-going passenger liner, Yank, the main character of The Hairy Ape, struggles constantly to assert his identity against the wealthy class, shockingly exhibited in the person of Mildred Douglass, daughter of the steel magnate who owns a steel manufacturing company and the boat on which he works. He accepts the tag of his peers as "the hairy ape," an appellation through which he projects himself as the fundamental element that drives the great engines of the world, a fixture without which the "Douglasses" of the world and the whole society shuts down. However, when he emerges from the comfort zone of his fellow workers in the great boiler room of the ship, he is woefully incompetent, both intellectually and socially, to compete. The tag "hairy ape," seems appropriate until the last scene when, ironically, he finds he "don't belong" even in the cages of the great apes themselves.