Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal, By Ralph Waldo Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914 – 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man (1952). Battle Royal was published in 1947 and became the opening chapter for the Invisible Man. Ellison starts Battle Royal with the narrator speaking of his grandparents who believed that they were separate but equal during white segregation. The narrator’s grandfather was known as a meek and quiet person since his freedom from slavery. It was only on his deathbed when the grandfather decided to speak truthfully about his feelings throughout his life. He spoke bitterly to the narrator’s father, comparing the lives of black Americans to warfare and admitted to feeling like a traitor. With “yeses” and “grins,” the grandfather wanted to undermine the whites and told his family to “agree ’em to death and destruction.” As a grown man, the narrator too lives meekly; receiving praise from the white society and invitations to speak.

At his high school graduation, the narrator gives a speech urging for humility and submission as key to the advancement of black Americans. It proves such a success that the town arranges to have him deliver it at a gathering of the community’s leading white citizens. At the event, the narrator is told to take part in a ‘battle royal.’ At the battle royal, the narrator and some of his classmates, who are black as well, are subjected to physical and mental torture while forced to perform a fight for various elitist, white male individuals of power within the community. When it comes time for the narrator to give his speech, the white men all laugh, ignore him and give him uproarious applause as he finishes his speech. The men award him a calfskin briefcase and ins...

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...well versed and knowledgeable the narrator may be, the white citizens would not accept the individual that he is and would categorize him along with the other black Americans that participated in the battle royal. Their actions throughout the opening chapter explained their intentions to disregard the narrator for the individual he may be, but to demonize him for the color of skin he has. Emerson believes that self-reliance comes from within the individual, rather than within society. Although that narrator was born into this terrible situation, ‘no kernel of nourishing corn’ will come from the white citizens but from within his unique individualist mentality.

The grandfather’s individualism is also portrayed in the beginning of “Battle Royal.” His meekness and quiet personality was a façade only used to trick the white citizens he dealt with on a daily basis.