A Report to an Academy

In “A Report to an Academy,” the only major character is Red Peter. The Academy has asked him to provide a report about his past life as an ape in the Gold Coast. Because he has focused so intently on becoming human, he has mostly forgotten his life as an ape and largely relies on others’ accounts to convey his experience.

In his speech, he speaks well, but at times comes across as a pseudo-intellectual. He strains to speak in metaphor but resorts to using plain speech. However, he does later convey self-awareness about his intellect, noting that he has “attained the average education of a European man” (7).

After the hunting party shot, captured, and imprisoned him on the ship, he focused on finding a “way out.” He does not equate a “way out” with freedom, and notes that “people all too often are deceived by freedom” (3). Although he does not seek to become fully free, he does intend to do whatever is necessary to become uncaged.

Aboard the ship, he achieved an inner calm, for which he credits his captors. This is part of a pattern in which he expresses unwarranted gratitude toward the men who held him captive. While caged, he became wholly focused on imitating humans, in hope of becoming one. One of his captors tried to teach him to drink alcohol, but Red Peter struggled to mimic this behavior. In response, the man used his pipe to burn Red Peter’s fur. But Red Peter commends the man’s torturous actions because, in his deluded view, they “were fighting on the same side against ape nature” (7). It seems that Red Peter intentionally deluded himself as a means to maintain a degree of hopefulness about his dire situation. He understood that his only chance to find a “way out” was dependent upon his ability to remain pragmatically focused on becoming human. This focus allowed him to compartmentalize his captors’ brutal treatment, and to delude himself about their benevolent intentions.

As his presentation draws to a close, he speaks in a bureaucratic tone. Though he has struggled mightily to attain humanness, his affiliation with this scientific institution shows how readily that bureaucracy can minimize one’s humanity. This places Red Peter in a Kafkaesque struggle, a genre in which the individual faces existential struggles because of pervasive, soulless bureaucracy.