The Internal Battle Royal

Filled to the brim with blaring racism, disgusting profanity, and poisonous hated, Ralph Ellison’s Battle Royal evokes emotion to the fullest extent. The painfully lucid imagery and descriptive passages that depict the horrifying bigotry and intolerance towards the narrator make Battle Royal hard to stomach and harder yet to fully emotionally comprehend. However, though the sickening plotline of violence and degradation is most striking and first captures the eye (or perhaps more fittingly, the heart), Ellison’s story cannot be solely classified as a narrative of racial injustice and inequality: it is, in fact, a story of the struggle for identity.
“I am an invisible man!” Already within the first paragraph, Ellison provides us with the material to piece together the fact that the narrator is lost. “All my life I had been looking for something…I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.” Ellison then introduces a new element: a curse. It is with this curse bestowed by the narrator’s grandfather while on his deathbed, that the narrator begins his descent into a rather deep identity crisis. The grandfather spoke of the ongoing fight between races, of his role as a quiet “traitor”, of his emphasis on beating the white man by playing his own game of feigned respect and good conduct. His words, though perhaps meant to be instructive, instantly became something of a catalyst to his impressionable grandson, for as soon as they were uttered, they hardened into chains that bound the narrator to a split life. From that point on, whenever the narrator felt joy or compassion from being kind and humble to a member of the white community, he felt the biting meaning behind his grandfathers words: “And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery”. Such an internal battle could only lead to a sense of tumultuous loss of one’s own concept of identity.
It is upon this axis of split identity that the narrator continues to rotate blindly throughout the duration of the story. Ever since the moment the curse it spoken, the narrator seems to lose his true self underneath the weight of it. When faced with the horrors within the ring of the Battle Royal, the narrator can very clearly and easily feel physical pain and suffering. He can very easily distinguish the blows to his head, the taste of his own blood, and the sounds of racist jeering and yelling all around him. His level of intelligence is high and his sense of moral recognition isProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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intact, “Some were still crying and in hysteria. But as we tried to leave we were stopped and ordered to get into the ring. There was nothing to do but what we were told.” However, though fully able to decipher and understand the terrors of the violent situation he has been put into, the narrator’s sense of self (stemming from lack of known identity) remains confused and entirely distorted as he cannot give up his trust and faith in the “good” conduct of the white men. This warped viewpoint presents itself multiple times throughout the text, but most problematically when the narrator receives his prize at the end of the night, “I was so moved that I could hardly express my thanks…I was overjoyed; I did not even mind when I discovered the gold pieces I had scrambled for were brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobile.” If for no other reason than this twisted outlook alone, it is evident that thanks to the curse that split his identity in half, the narrator truly is an invisible man.(652)

Questions:
Is there any way to look upon the curse as a blessing?
If there had been no curse to set his fate, how do you think the narrator would have acted?
What is your definition of the meaning behind “the invisible man”

Nothing Less than A Romantic Hero

A & P by John Updike is easily one of my favorite short stories I have ever read. As soon as I started reading it, I became entranced. There is something so real about Updike’s style of writing. But that doesn’t even begin to explain it, its more than that, something deeper. Its as though Updike sat down and wrote a story that perfectly blended two entirely different genres of writing that almost never mix: realism and romance, oil and water. Its easy to see how A & P can be considered realistic writing, the sentences are short, the meaning is clear, the honesty is stark. The narrator, Sammy, a grocery store cashier, is a typical teenager, his character left unblemished by profound symbolism and the harsh prodding of analytical scrutiny. From the very first few sentences the reader becomes aware of Sammy’s youth and pubescent immaturity, “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. (1)” The grammar is simple and the tone is easy and flowing. As the plot moves forward, the piece exposes another realistic trait harnessed by Sammy, his consistent level of comedic input. Through humorous comments and descriptions, Updike is assigning his narrator a very clear personality type, one that demonstrates witty intelligence, and perhaps more importantly, one that separates him from the masses, or in Sammy’s words, the “sheep”. However, such traits are only intrinsic to his teenage character and do not yet identify him as anything but an amusing narrator. If the story began and ended as such, with no defining moment of revelation or character evolution, it would remain solely in the category of blatant realism. But Updike adds another ingredient to the mix: he makes Sammy a romantic hero. As his inner monologue progresses throughout the story, Sammy finally reaches a point of no return when he evolves into a character of extreme maturity. As he stands at his check-out slot, living his mundane life as the only wolf in a heard of sheep, he witnesses the scolding of the girl he has, in a way, fallen in love with by his manager. In an act of swift and decided heroic gesture, Sammy quits his job and walks through the doors, marking his departure from a haven of youthful safety to a world of harsh, livid reality. Within this scene alone, Sammy possesses all the traits of a true figure of romanticism; he shirks the idea of societal conformance, he expresses himself in true passionate emotion, and he rebels against the pre-set rules of conventionalism. As he steps out into the world he has just created for himself, Sammy is hit with reality, “my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” It is with this epiphany that Sammy emerges from the harsh fluorescent lighting and rubber-tiled floor into the realm of the true romantic hero, as he shirks his one-dimensional character, just as he shirked his grocer’s smock in the A & P. (543)

Skin Deep

According to Webster’s Dictionary, there are two viable definitions of the noun “scar:” “a mark left (as in the skin) by the healing of injured tissue” and “a lasting moral or emotional injury”. By both of these definitions, Maggie, the youngest daughter in Alice Walker’s short story Everyday Use, is significantly affected.
The most obvious and exterior example of scaring is evident upon Maggie in the physical form. She is the only character who is noticeably disfigured by the house fire that blemished her body years before Dee’s metamorphosis into Wangero. However, the scars serve not only as an insight to the external injury, but also as an intangible parallel to the marred inner turmoil Maggie has lived with ever since the fire. Through the imagery-filled description of her damaged daughter, the narrator allows the reader to effectively view the impact of the injuries suffered by Maggie in both a physical and emotional context, “Have you ever seen a lame animal…sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground. (9)” This ruined depiction of Maggie is emphasized even more when the narrator then goes on to compare her to the pristine physicality emanating from Dee in the next line, “Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure. (10)” Thus proving that the bodily scarring left over by the fire manifests itself onto Maggie’s physical being just as it does to her emotional frame of mind.
However, as evidenced almost immediately in the story, the source of Maggie’s scarring is not only the fire, nor does its effect remain external. In fact, the notion that Maggie is both physically and emotionally scarred unveils itself in the first few lines of the second paragraph “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes; she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe.” and to fully emphasize the source of Maggie’s scarred level of emotional security and self-worth, Walker reveals that “She [Maggie] thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word never learned to say to her.(2)” This passage paints the picture of a girl marred in several ways, as it lends focus to Maggie’s internal scarring caused by feelings of inferiority towards her sister and lack of confidence within herself.
Another prime example of Maggie’s heightened levels of decreased self worth in comparison with her sister displays itself later on in the text, after Wangero (formally Dee) has returned to her home. As soon as Wangero makes the confident demand for the hand-sewn quilts promised to Maggie, Maggie recognizes her place and backs down, allowing Wangero to receive the gifts instead “Like somebody used to never winning anything or having anything reserved for her.(74)” However, perhaps the most significant moment in this passage is visible within the body language exhibited by Maggie. As she willingly relinquishes her property, Maggie “stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. (75)”, thus illustrating her lack of confidence and self-assurance even in the face of her own kind and bloodline. (571)