Behind the ‘Battle Royal’

A visage of violence, uprising, gullibility, and realization Ralph Ellisons short flooring battle Royal depicts a different story that embroils the philosophical depths behind concepts of racism and suffering. It is ab proscribed pleasing people that results to losing your witness identity. It is a foreshadowing historical tragedy as the cashier attempts to tape drive his readers from idealism to realism and finally relating to the true meaning ones social identity.In the beginning of the story, a nameless, first-person cashier instinctively intimates that for the first cardinal years of his life, he has looked at others to answer skepticisms of self-definition. Identity issues could instantly be implicated as he disc ever soyplaces that it is only him who can figure out who he really is. In order to do this, the storyteller essential first discover that he is an invisible objet dart As the story unfurls, it transfixes a scene in which he muses that its not only him whos blind but also, those who abuse the teller by belittling him as mere stereotype and erasing his individuality and human di mension.The primary objective of the narrator in the story is just to deliver a good speech. worried about it, he was really worried. While blindfolded and being beat in the Battle Royal, he is still going over his speech inside his bearing. Symbolically, hes blind to the attackers that he essential fend off. This is a stark depiction of the narrators enunciate blindness to racism happening around him and the all the dehumanizing acts that he is compel to participate in. Then, the narrator is softly remembering his grandfathers death. The narrator overhears him imparting some words to his father.Those words haunted the narrators psyche for years to come. On his deathbed, the narrators grandfather gives him a rather affect advice. The old man said Son, after Im deceased I want you to keep up the good fight. I neer told you, but I have been a traitor al l my innate(p) days, a spy in the enemys country ever since I gave up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lions mouth. I want you to overcome them with yeses, demoralize them with grins, agree them to death and destruction, let them swallow you till they vomit or bust wide open. Learn it to the young ones.Using personification, Ellison represents the lion as the fresh man, who will roar throughout the duration of the story. The men roared as the narrator will struggle for the coins on the electric rug. When he tries to pull a white man onto the rug, the man raise up roaring with gag and kicks him in the chest. During the narrators speech, the men yell for him to repeat the sesquipedalian social responsibility and the room fills with the uproar of laughter. Clearly, the narrators question of identity could be traced back to the weary lives of his grandparents who were born as African slaves and freed years before.Rhetorically, this freedom bestowed unto t hem and made them part of a United States. nevertheless in the closer analysis, in the social circles during their time and as what the narrator experienced, African-Americans are still separated from whites it is somewhat like the separate fingers on the hand. Ellison descriptively used animals to symbolically represent people because in the course of history white men traditionally treated the lightlessness people as animals. In the first place, they were slaves. Also, when white men follow naked white women as sexual objects, ironically the white men transform themselves to animals.One instance in the story depicted a man who watches the woman dance and holds his arms up like an intoxicated coon bear. Although the symbolism of the animal imageries is not very obvious, how Ellison showcased these symbolism reinforced his themes. It adds up to the life and vitality of mental pictures demonstrating the vividness of Ellisons storytelling. Works Cited Ellison, R. W. Battle Royal. In Literature Reading, Reaching, Writing. Compact Fifth Edition by Kirszner & Mandell, p. 174 -185.