Themes in Ralph Ellison’s 'The Battle Royal'

Throughout history, and even in today’s time period African Americans have had to fight to basically live. Over time, many great authors have written pieces to convey what African Americans went through. Ralph Ellison was one of many authors to address the problem through one of his works. Most African Americans do not let white people control them. But in Ralph Ellison’s historical fiction Invisible Man, the narrator was blinded by the antics of white people. In this novel, the narrator’s skin color prevents him from finding himself. In the story, the black boy struggles to fit in a predominantly white society. An important even that took place in his piece was the Battle Royal. In Ralph Ellison’s the Battle Royal, the narrator is forced to participate in an aggressive fight with other men while they were blindfolded. The fight included ten boys who had to fight with boxing gloves until only two of them were left in the ring. The Battle Royal served as an example of the control that white people had over both society and African Americans directly.

The Battle Royal shows the narrator to be stuck in a white driven society. The story begins with the narrator thinking about advice that his grandfather gave him. The narrators grandfather told him to, “Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction.” The advice from his grandfather is intended to go against oppression from whites, but that advice led to him being submissive to them.

The fight is set up as a system that degrades and shames black people. They were offered money but had to get it from an electrified floor while being laughed at. The purpose of the graphic description is to help to emphasize the theme of blindness in the story. Blindness is used to help convey how much African Americans are victims of racism, but they are not alert to how much they are discriminated against. After he is beat up and covered in blood, he is forced to give a speech about the significance of education to other African Americans. While giving his speech and quoting Booker T Washington, the white men laugh at him. In the speech, he guided the African Americans to accept “social responsibility.” The narrator gives the advice to his own people without even thinking about how it affects them simply because he is doing what they wanted him to do.

The tone and language that Ellison uses also plays a part in the theme of the Battle Royal. While the boys were fighting, the on lookers used foul and bad mouthing language to get the fighters even more aggressive. The way they controlled them with only words is another example of how they had control over African Americans.

The theme of this work is that racism can be an obstacle in knowing your identity. The narrator struggles to be seen as real individual person throughout the whole work. Because of the color of your skin, you are seen differently by different people. When he finished his speech, he was awarded a briefcase covered in calfskin. The calfskin alludes to the skin of African Americans and how they are comparably sacrificed through racism. This is still a problem, even today, more than eight decades later.