Comparing Battle Royal By Ralph Ellison And Sweat By Zora Neale Hurston

Although both short stories “Battle Royal” By Ralph Ellison and “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston both have a deeper meaning when it comes to reading more on the characters, they both have the theme of the power of struggle or good versus evil. To elaborate, the power of struggle can be shown in these two short stories through the characters Delia, and the narrator. To further compare both stories, they are both black people who are portrayed the same and treated the same by racist folks. Furthermore, in the short story “Sweat” Delia represents her hardworking portrait, and in “Battle Royal” the narrator the challenges and pain they endured in America as slaves. Overall, the theme of the story portrays the power of struggle because, at the end

Delia lives with her antagonist which is her husband “Sykes” who is lazy. During the story, Delia shows how sad and abusive her husband can be. For instance, “Ah done tole you time and again to keep them white folks’ clothes outta dis house.”(Hurston 314) While you read the short story you notice how the little things show the characteristic of both characters. Furthermore, in the short story, there are only two characters that are portrayed the most, and Delia the protagonist shows her power of struggle during moments of abuse. Delia works as a washerwoman and assumes that she works for white people which is stated in the book and it can show signs of racism that she has gotten towards her. To add, Delia is a woman who seems like she has her life planned and wants to just live at her small house for the rest of her life, but she never plans an escape plan or a plan to leave Skyes. At the end of the

The narrator tells a background story about his grandfather and how he used to be a slave. The narrator is a normal person and he is someone who studied to be in the same workforce as the other white men. The struggles that the narrator faces throughout the story are race, gender, and class. For instance, “But now I felt a sudden fit of the blind of terror. I was unused to darkness. It was suddenly found myself in a dark room filled with poisonous cottonmouths.” (Ellison 342) The narrator felt out of place at this event because it was just a bunch of white men and a few black men who were treated with no respect. A bunch of words and racist comments were getting thrown at this group of men. The narrator realized the workspace that he was working in and getting treated with no respect the same route everyone else took. Furthermore, at this point in the story, it was just all about racism, and how the narrator was supposed to find his self-identity. This reveals how white men are oppressing the black men in the story and how the problem they faced as slaves and the challenges and pain one had to endure to achieve anything useful in the white man-dominated land. Overall, the power of struggle occurs with the three concepts of the narrator which are race, class, and gender. The narrator eventually has to realize how he