Literary Devices In Battle Royal

the rug. With all of this coming to a close, with the savage white folks beating and humiliating the young black schoolboys they are told to leave with the money collected.

Finally the moment he has been waiting for, he is giving the opportunity to give his speech, with his face black and blue and the blood filling his throat he is able to put it all away and deliver his speech but in giving it the men all are laughing and carrying on in conversation among themselves. They mock him at times and tease him by asking him to repeat his words, he eventually gets so fed up he says the words “social equally” the whole room goes quite because those were words that were not spoken in that time in history. He able to call that a mistake and continues his speech in blaming the blood in his mouth caused him to say when he meant social responsibly. At the end of his speech they cheered as they gave him a briefcase containing a …show more content…
They were just giving the ability to attend school (blacks only), they still weren’t giving the normal human rights to be able to speak freely, vote in political polls, and they had their own bathrooms separate then the white. So all of this really showed where we were as a country, still in this dark dim close minded nation. “Battle Royal” opens with us seeing the narrator’s grandfather on his death bed expanding his life how he was spy for his people. It was a quite powerful scene if you really dived into it, it showed how the blacks at that time couldn’t live freely nor could live without being persecuted by the whites if they didn’t in terms “suck up” to the whites. He instructed his grandson to “live in the lion’s mouth, overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction.” (Ellison 503) with these words, they guided and planted seeds in our narrators life would shape the rest of his