Existentialism in The Hairy Ape

Existentialism in The Hairy Ape

 

“Yank is seated in the foreground. He seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest. They respect his superior strength – the grudging respect of fear”.

 

Yank, the central character of the play The Hairy Ape by birth, does not hold any remarkable qualities, unless his physical strength and aggressive energy. Thus, at the beginning of the play he is introduced as a human with animalistic qualities, which is reflected through his behaviour as well. It is this hard and wild beast like instinct based on his own attitude differentiates him from other stokers.

 

Among the stokers, only two of them Long and Paddy have been given names, but they symbolize two different attitudes. Long is rather a radical and dreaming of golden age of social equality and justice accompanied by the right to vote and other constitutional means. Paddy, on the other hand dreams of golden age in the past, highly nostalgic about his personal life.   The other stokers remain nameless thereby lack self and identity. It is Yank alone who has been given a distinct personality. This distinct personality is the basic quality for being an existentialist.

 

Mildred Douglas and her aunt appears in the scene two. They represent the elite luxurious capitalist class. Mildred is brought here to confront with Yank to bring out Yank’s sense of existentialism. Mildred makes a fleeting appearance in the life of Yank like a ghost, after that his sense of feeling insignificance in insecurity intensify rapidly and eventually leads to his death.

 

The play focuses primarily the life and experiences of Yank, the other characters simply constitute the background which inflates the personality of Yank. In the opening scene, Yank has been presented realistically and the external details of his appearance, gestures, motions, etc., have been graphically and vividly given. But after his confrontation with Mildred Douglas the action is increasingly internalized in the sense that rest of his life focuses the psychological trauma. He is obsessed with a feeling of insecurity and insignificance. This creates angst in his mind, which instigates him to take a revenge on Mildred and her people, for such revenge would restore his sense of self-respect and feeling of security. He pushes against the crowd of people on the Fifth Avenue and strikes his first in the face of a fat man. In this way he wants to demonstrate to them his own physical superiority over them. The result is he soon finds himself in jail.

 

Yank’s mind is obsessed with bitter experience which drives him agitated. In prison he sees himself as a hairy ape in a cage, which forces him to break cell and comes out. He has the strength of a gorilla, but is no longer capable of generating rational thoughts. He is put behind the bars. After his release, he goes straight to the zoo. Even in desperate mood he is guided by his own decision. It is this decision that makes him move to zoo. As he is an individual, he is unable to find any replica of his mind in society, so he goes to zoo, where the caged ape gives him temporary relief as he believes wrongly that the ape belongs to his world. Against his wish he is injured by ape which puts him in a very desperate and desolated condition which ends with his death. This kind of despair, an existentialist should undergo in their lifetime.

 

This alienated condition makes him experience the existential suffering. This existential suffering, in turn, breathes a new essence into his existence.