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Literary Elements In Battle Royal, By Ralph Ellison

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In Ralph Ellison’s short story “Battle Royal” Ellison describes how after graduation he battles to survive the chaos that trembles around him. Ellison was educated at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studied music. His only published novel was, “Invisible Man” and it gained his reputation as a writer. In order to get what you want, Ellison went through a fight by himself, in a way that the price was too deadly to go through. The literary element that is strong in the story, imagery is important because you can see his event in your head like how he describes the experience and the how the readers feels his pain in how they response in the actions in the story. Ellison as a boy, has a flashback to when his grandfather die and how his last words before dying puzzled …show more content…

After that they were blindfolded and started boxing each other for money. After all that he finally delivered his speech, got a briefcase, and a scholarship to the state college for Negroes. He woke up at the end of the story from his dream about his grandfather after all that he just went through. This story feels like you're in Ellison's stiatuoian and want to help him when he describes his body's reaction and can see everything horrible at the beginning of the fight. “The smoke has become thicker, restricting my lungs with my saliva became like hot bitter glue. A glove connected to my head and I could not tell if the moisture on my body and everywhere was seat or blood. A blow hit my neck sending me down to the floor hitting my head hard on the floor.”(Ellison pg 237). The reader response to this by actual seeing the smoke and the feeling of being sweaty or having blood on them. The reader cringes when he gets knocked down, because the reader can imagine hearing the thud of the head hitting the ground, and the yelling from the

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Ellison’s main character proclaimed during the battle, “he came at me as though he meant to beat it out of me” (para. 28). We see the throughout, that violence and struggles the African Americans encountered were heightened until the very end of the story, as threats were alluded in every conversation and contact with the white man. This formation of precise verbiage Ellison offers actually helps to convey the intensity of stress and anxiety African Americans faced and still do face

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As John Boyle O'Reilly once said “Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.” In other words, O’Reilly is stating in order to see change, you must make changes. For instance, you can't just pretend to be meek and servile around white men so that one day he will be in a position to undermine the status quo.

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Authors would describe several details of the event, using imagery in their writing. The short story, The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell, incorporates imagery to intensify the suspense within the literary piece. By using this literary element, Connell depicts a mood that escalates from casualness to increasing panic. The story’s state of casualness is only the beginning of the upcoming fiasco.

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In this journal entry, I will talk about a few symbols throughout the story. I will show how Ellison used this building block to create a meaningful story. First, Ellison uses the title as a symbol. The title “Battle Royal” shows the struggle of the African Americans for equality in the early years of the 1900s. Throughout the story it shows how much harder it was for African American males.

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In this scene Ellison uses the power of the white men to demonstrate the blacks struggle for equality. The whites force the blacks to fight each other for, as the book states, entertainment purposes. Physically the blacks are fighting each other, however emotionally, the battle represents a fight against the power in which the whites exercise over the blacks. “Everyone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy.”

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In the beginning of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal” the narrator is an African American guy who struggles with finding his true self. He talks about how he needs to find answers and how he accepts other people's answers but not his own. Finally, he realizes that he was the only one who was able to answer them. His grandfather's last words left an impact on him, making him feel

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In the short story Battle Royale by Ralph Ellison, the theme was grounded in fear. The group of African American boys were forced in participation in harmful activities. His grandfather gave him advice in the beginning of the story. The meaning to his grandfather’s last words could be translated into two ways; to rebel or to follow. The grandfather was instructing him to agree with the white man's orders.

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Further humiliation was in store when the boys had to fight for coins and bills that were strewn on a rug, which they realized too late was electrified. The “good, hard American cash” (Ellison 8) that they thought they were fighting for turned out to be “brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobiles” (Ellison 12). The entire incident made the narrator understand his own invisibility; the blacks were not important enough to be allowed to fight for real

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The Battle Royal is a chapter from the novel “Invisible man” by Ralph Ellison. The plot is about a young afro-american male who has made a speech and is told he will obtain the opportunity to present his speech in front of a group of wealthy white men. The speech is about the afro-americans place in society and moreover their correlation to the white people. The boy has been praised because of his obedience towards the white population. The speech was going to be presented in the ballroom of a hotel but when the narrator arrives his events of the night takes a very unpleasant turn and he is forced to participate in the Battle Royal.

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The nude dancer represents the oppression of women and African Americans by Caucasian men, and her tattoo stands for the freedom the African Americans desire to have. The blindfold is symbolic of the narrator’s figurative and literal blindness, and the battle itself is representative of the African Americans fight for equality. “Battle Royal” expresses the difficulty facing African Americans people as they try to achieve social equality. In order for the nameless narrator to receive his prize he must be able to endure whatever the Caucasian want him to do which the narrator illustrates in the battle royal boxing match. During the early twenty century African American and women were treated like puppet on a string, an object of entertainment for Caucasian males.

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“Battle Royal” was published in 1947 by Ralph Ellison as the first chapter of his only published novel the Invisible Man (1952). The story begins with the protagonist’s drawn-out struggle for an adult identity in the corrupt world that was filled with racial prejudice at the time. Although this story was written many years ago it can also relate to many things going on today such as racism and social standards. Ellison states throughout the story that he was constantly trying to figure out who he was and search for something to do with his life in order to be successful.

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