is the real heart of modern civilization But as the play goes on steel begins to mean something else It becomes a symbol of imprisonment and oppression The ship itself is made of steel and it traps Yank and the other workers like animals in a cage Later when Yank goes to jail the steel bars again surround him So steel finally shows how modern industrial life has trapped men like Yank instead of giving them freedom The Ape Primitive Man and Lost Identity The ape is another strong symbol From the beginning Yank is compared to an ape by others and even by himself Mildred calls him The filthy beast Yank begins to think he truly is an ape The ape represents man s primitive side the part that existed before civilization language or class Yank cannot understand the complex world around him In the final scene when he meets the real ape in the zoo he calls it brother This moment shows his total confusion he feels closer to an animal than to human society The ape thus becomes a symbol of Yank s lost identity Rodin s The Thinker The Need to Understand O Neill uses the image of Rodin s famous statue The Thinker several times Yank takes this pose whenever he faces something he cannot understand For example after being rejected by society and thrown out of the labor union he sits like The Thinker This position shows that Yank wants to think deeply but cannot He has physical power but no mental power to understand his situation It symbolizes the failure of modern man to think and find meaning in an industrial world Mildred s White Dress Class Division When Mildred comes down to the stokehole she wears a clean white dress The white color stands for purity wealth and privilege It shows that she belongs to the upper class She is untouched by the dirt and struggle of working people Her dress becomes a powerful contrast to the black smoky world of Yank and the stokers When Yank sees her he calls her a white ghost To him she seems unreal like a creature from another world This symbol shows the huge gap between classes the rich and the poor live in completely different worlds that can never meet The Cage Imprisonment The cage appears both in the jail and in the zoo at the end It stands for spiritual and social imprisonment Yank is trapped by society because he does not belong to any class Yank says Christ Where do I fit in The final scene where the ape kills him inside the cage becomes symbolic of his tragic end He is destroyed by the very world that made him strong The cage also represents the loss of freedom and identity in the modern industrial age Through these symbols O Neill shows the emptiness of modern life Yank begins as a man of power but ends as a helpless animal The symbols express his journey from strength to confusion from pride to death In the end The Hairy Ape becomes a tragic story of a man who cannot find where he belongs in a mechanical divided world