Regardless of what else the chorus may do, it also creates the isolation for the hairy ape Yank. Yank reveals that he does not uphold any nostalgia for home. Having been brought up by parents that fought with each other and beat him, he ran away early, revealing that his environment has never been healthy. At rise, Yank is a stoker who works in the underbelly of the ship. The ceiling, according to the stage direction, is so low that it forced the men to walk hunched as Neaderthal Man.
While these environments seem easily escapable, at least in theory, environments become a fate-like prison, not unlike the cages that Yank is behind in most of the scenes. Heredity helps hold the prisoner because Yank has been given no mentioned innate advantages but seems rather limited in his thought process, especially with each scene opening with The Thinker and Yank seeming to be a rather frustrated thinker at that. Second, environments create our experience, and we use experience to make decisions that create the next environment. During Yank's youth, he knows only that he wants to leave home. He has no experience with anything other than home, and jumps immediately into a new miserable experience. I believe, though, that the best example of how one environment leads to another is the newspaper that he finds while in jail. He believes the senator who says the IWW wants to destroy things, and so he goes to the IWW having no experience with the fact that, even when politicians don't lie, the media will.
Of course, we don't like to believe that there is any fate in a free democratic society. No matter what your heredity and environment, you are supposed to be able to aspire to any heights, and examples of this upward mobility (in O'Neill's home, a mobility called the American Dream) are made available, even if only to ease our consciousness when we ostracize real-life hairy apes like Yank. I don't think O'Neill believes that people are unable to escape their environment and heredity-their circumstances-but he may argue, and I will, that the ability to escape one's circumstances makes one a hero not unlike Marlowe's Tamberlaine, to make peace with circumstances equates one with Odysseus, and to fall victim to one's circumstances, as Yank and Willy Loman do, opens the tragic pit that once enveloped Pentheus (The Bacchae) and Odysseus.
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