Essay on Yank’s Absurd Inheritance in The Hairy Ape

Yank’s Absurd Inheritance in The Hairy Ape It is intriguing how Eugene O’Neill stages the audience for The Hairy Ape. When the curtain opens upon the forecastle of the transatlantic liner, the audience is immediately beset by Yank’s seemingly unassailable sense of identity. â€Å"Everting else dat makes de woild move, somep’n makes it move. It can’t move without somep’n else, see? Den yuh get down to me. I’m at de bottom, get me!† (261). Yank trumpets himself, in effect, as the prime mover of the industrial world. He â€Å"belongs† because that world, like its metonym the ocean-liner, depends upon him to function: â€Å"I’m de ting in coal dat makes it boin; I’m steam and oil for de engines . . . Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I’m†¦show more content†¦Treat ‘em rough, dat’s me† (255). When the â€Å"alienation effect intervenes,† notes Brecht in his discussion of Chinese acting, it does not inhib it the spectators’ emotions but instead disengages those emotions from their implicit connection to character so that they â€Å"need not correspond to those of the character portrayed† (Willet 94). It is not so much that O’Neill’s audience, at the beginning of the play, reacts with Yank, as it is that his audience reacts to Yank. O’Neill, then, stages his audience to be as critical towards, as they are sympathetic to, both Yank’s ideology in this opening scene and to his struggle to belong in the scenes that follow. It is clear that O’Neill intends Yank, at least in part, as a modern day Everyman. In an interview for the New York Herald Tribune in 1924, O’Neill describes Yank as â€Å"a symbol of man, who has lost his old harmony with nature†; but Yank is not exclusively symbolic, for later in the same interview, O’Neill admits, â€Å"I personally do not believe that an idea can be readily put over to an audience except through characters† (110). It is, instead, that Yank is an allegorization of humanity—both â€Å"an abstract expressionistic symbol† and â€Å"a concrete dramatic character,† to borrow Peter Egri’s terminology (98). But if Yank is an Everyman whose struggles allegorize those of humanity, then he is clearly an Everyman made strange. The reason why O’Neill distances his audience undoubtedly derives from what he considers to be