The Man I Became (Original title: Geschiedenis van een berg) is a fictional work written by Dutch postmodernist writer Peter Verhelst.

Following the party, the narrator is brought to a sort of amusement park, "Dreamland", where the animals are assigned various human jobs based on their capabilities.

He gains enough trust from his supervisors to earn a badge showing his rank as fully human, where he is promoted to a management position and a nice apartment.

The narrator ends up with a mindless job in the financially devastated city near the park, where he eventually befriends Lucia, the daughter of Dreamland's owner, and comes to live with her.

The narrator is placed against his will in a society of other animals trying to play the game of social interaction through small talk to gain notoriety and ascend the ranks to become fully human.

[5] The Man I Became was originally published in Dutch by Uitgeverij Prometheus as Geschiedenis van een berg during 2013 in both print and e-book format.

The Oxford Review described the plot as Verhelst's narrator posing vague questions about the nature of humanity that remain unanswered, which they found both frustrating and fascinating, as well as integral to the story's form.

[5] In a review for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard compared the work to Will Self’s Great Apes and James Lever’s Me Cheeta, stating that it "seems at first to be a not-too-sophisticated satire on humanity" but that it was ultimately a "haunting, apocalyptic novella, supremely and deliberately difficult to pin down".

[11] A reviewer for NRC Handelsblad was also critical, stating that they saw the narrator as too mature for an ape that has only just joined humanity and that this felt like a cliche Verhelst should have avoided.