Racism Exposed In Battle Royal, By Ralph Ellison

Years ago African Americans and Caucasians didn’t get along due to slavery. Ralph Ellison is telling a story that involves a young African American being invisible. The narrator seems to suggest that if you can’t be seen then you can’t be heard. He had to learn that he was nobody in the eyes of others. As his grandfather is on his deathbed, he gives him a controversial perspective which stuck with him throughout the story. The young boy is an eloquent speaker, and he is asked to give a speech in front of a particularly belittling audience. Being an African American made life very difficult in this era due to racism and being invisible to others. In this short story “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison the author illustrates the racial tension through …show more content…
For example, the antagonists in the story made him fight blindfolded. In the Book Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon, the author elaborates on the meaning explaining that, “the invisible man’s invisibility is a function of blindness, and the novel is full of images of distorted vision, blindfolds, and other forms of sightlessness” (Nadel, 35). When the narrator’s tormentors made him fight blindfolded, it not only provoked violence, but it also displayed the extent of the deception. Even today there still lies tension between races as a result of the “invisibility” of certain groups. The narrator was invisible was being ostracized because the color of his skin tone. Throughout the events, the battle gets more intense and the grueling men thought it was perfectly fine to torture him. The fact that they were invisible did not fall as a fault to the victims, but the men conducting this “program” were consciously ignoring them. The men equated the values of these victims of their own property and treated them like animals. The men that conducted the battle not only distorted the definition of civility, but they destroyed the ideology of what it means to be