"I can only sketch from hindsight, and in human words, what I then felt as an ape, and therefore I am sketching it incorrectly, but even if I can no longer attain the old apish truth, my description isn't basically off course, and no doubt about it.Page four of eight
And yet up to then, I had had so many ways out and now no longer one. I had boxed myself in. If I had been nailed down that couldn't have subtracted from my freedom of action. Why so? Scratch the sink between your toes till it bleeds, and you still won't find the reason. Press yourself backwards against the bars until they nearly cut you in two, you won't find the reason. I had no way out, but I had to create one for myself, because without it I couldn't live. Always up against the side of that crate-I would definitely have dropped dead. But, for Hagenbeck, apes belong at the side of the crate- so I stopped being an ape. A lucid, elegant train of thought, which I must have somehow hatched out with my belly, because apes think with their belly."
A Report to an Academy is a short story by Franz Kafka in which the narrator, an ape who has gained attention for becoming human like in thought and action, describes his transformation in a letter requested by an academy. This text reminded me greatly of a book I read in elementary school, The Music of Dolphins by Karen Hesse, in which a feral child, raised by dolphins, is put through rehabilitation only to return to life in the sea. In this story the ape is looking for a way out of capture rather than complete "freedom on all sides." In order to get his way out he preforms tasks for human amusement until he can completely imitate them and they let him live as one. In the Music of Dolphins the narrator, Mila, tries to appease her doctors by becoming more like them, reading, writing and playing music, but is tormented by locked doors and closed spaces. Mila does not see the appeal of a way out, she desires the freedom the ape thinks is impossible to find again.
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