There are many things and concepts one can come across while reading of the play "The Hairy Ape". Here, I have tried to take major concepts in consideration with explanation through the play.

1. The Hairy Ape
by Eugene O’Neill
Kaushal H. Desai
https://sites.google.com/view/kaushaldesai

2. Existentialism
I am Kaushal Desai
Mail: kaushaldesai123@gmail.com
Site: https://sites.google.com/view/kaushaldesai

3. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
• Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16,
1888 – November 27, 1953) was an
American playwright and Nobel laureate in
Literature.
• His poetically titled plays were among the
first to introduce into American drama
techniques of realism earlier associated
with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov,
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and
Swedish playwright August Strindberg.

4. eugeNe O’Neill (1888-1953)
• His plays were among the first to include speeches in American
vernacular and involve characters on the fringes of society, where they
struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately slide into
disillusionment and despair.
• O'Neill wrote only one well-known comedy (Ah, Wilderness!). Nearly all
of his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism.
• Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956)
• Horizon (1928)
• Anna Christie (1922)
• Strange Interlude (1928)
• The Icemen Cometh (1946)

5. Title:
• O’Neill’s interest in how machines can replace humans as
valuable workers. The title surrounds with a man goes in
materialistic process and from the society he got the self
as ape.

6. Theme:
• Human Regression by Industrialization
• The Frustration of Class
• Racial degeneration
• Masculinity
• Pride, Identity, and Belonging/Existentialism
• Exploitation, Oppression, and the Individual
• Aggression and Stupidity
• Progress and Happiness

7. Character List
• Yank
• Mildred Douglas
• Mildred's Aunt
• Paddy
• Long
• The Secretary
• Gentleman
• Second Engineer
• The Guard

8. Robert "Yank" Smith
• Filthy beast?
• Lurking for identity?
• Is Masculinity curse?
• Marginalized?
• Hero or mad man?

9. Major concepts of the
play
There are several concepts one can come
across while reading of this play.

10. Concept of Existentialism
• Existentialism is commonly associated with Left-Bank
Parisian cafes and the ‘family’ of philosophers Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who gathered there in the
years immediately following the liberation of Paris at the
end of World War II.
• One imagines offbeat, avant-garde intellectuals, attached
to their cigarettes, listening to jazz as they hotly debate
the implications of their new-found political and artistic
liberty. The mood is one of enthusiasm, creativity,
anguished self-analysis, and freedom – always freedom.

11. Expressionistic drama
• The realistic setting has been to create an impression of overcrowding
in the way of an expressionist. Yank, have been realistically presented,
“Hairy-chested, with long arms of tremendous power, and low, receding
brows above their small, fierce, resentful eyes. All the civilized white
races are represented, but except for the slight differentiation in color
of hair, skin, eyes, all these men are alike. He represents to them a self-
expression.
• “I am a busted Ingersoll, dat’s what. Steel was me and I owned de woild.
Now I ain’t steel, and de woild owns me. Aw, hell! I can’t see — it’s all
dark, get me? It’s all wrong! ~Yank

12. Marxist theory in “The Hairy Ape”
• Eugene O’Neill presents a sharp division among
social classes, which he illustrates by presenting
strong contrasts between the world of the ship
workers (proletariat) and that of the cruise-
goer (bourgeoisie).
• In Gundrisse, Karl Marx wrote of the necessity
to fully understand the significance and impact
of the class delineations, he posited that
“classes, again are but an empty word unless
we know what are the elements on which they
are based, such as wage-labor, capital, etc.”
(Grundisse, 650).

13. Rodin's "The Thinker"
• Throughout The Hairy Ape, O’Neill
references Rodin’s “The Thinker” in his stage
notes as a way of representing Yank ’s
internal struggle to understand the nature of
his own unhappiness. “The Thinker” is a
sculpture by Augustine Rodin that depicts a
large, muscular man sitting nude in deep
thought with his chin resting on one hand.
• Yank out of the office, he sits in the streets
and assumes the position of Rodin’s “The
Thinker.” “So dem boids don’t tink I belong,
neider.” Talking to himself,

14. Other works like
“The Hairy Ape”

15. Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal
A young woman works as a low-level
stenographer and lives with her mother. She
follows the rituals that society expects of a
woman, however resistant she may feel about
them. She subsequently marries her boss,
whom she finds repulsive. After having a baby
with him, she has an affair with a younger man
who fuels her lust for life. Driven to murder her
husband, she is convicted of the crime and is
executed in the electric chair.

16. Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine
It is a landmark of American Expressionism, reflecting
the growing interest in this highly subjective and
nonrealistic form of modern drama. The author of this
play takes us through Mr. Zero’s trial, execution,
excursion and arrest going into the afterlife. During the
whole series of this episodic journey Mr. Zero is
surprisingly oblivious to his deepest needs, wants and
desires. The story focuses on Mr. Zero, an accountant at
a large, faceless company. After 25 years at his job, he
discovers that he will be replaced by an adding machine.
In anger and pain, he snaps and kills his boss.

17. Movie: Modern Times (1936)
• The American dream, a prominent feature of
the movie, Chaplin’s American Dream was a
small shack with a puddle out back, saying that
is not how much you have that is what matters
but what it means to you.
• The struggle of survival, the movie takes on
social issue: poor becomes more poorer from
the hierarchy of upper class people. How they
treated and many more issues which is
presented in this movie.

18. Somewhere I Belong - Linkin Park

19. ThaNk YOu…
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