Franz Kafka’s A Report to the Academy is a short story, in the form of a first-person account voiced by a human-like ape who was shot and captured in West Africa then transported to Europe by ship in a cage. ‘Red Peter’ is driven to escape his cage, so he embraces the process and performance of becoming human, which includes learning to speak and behave like one of his captors.

‘Freedom was not what I wanted,’ he reports, retrospectively. ‘Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion… To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.’ Red Peter has a strong incentive for self-transformation, but it has little to do with chasing his dreams. He doesn’t become human-like because it is a higher or better way of being. He does it purely to escape the trap.