Racism

Through the grandfather's haunting words of advice, the story reaches to presumably the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, issued in the midst of the Civil War. Eighty-five years later, in approximately 1949, the narrator must come to terms with his family's history. The story interweaves various levels of obvious and subtle racism in the projection of a nightmarish racial hatred. The offensive epithets speak for themselves. The economic structure of the spectacles implicitly criticize ways in which money and economic power sustain the expression of racial hatred. As the schoolmates fight each other for coins, trying not to get shocked, it seems that Battle Royal or The Invisible Man Ellison is proposing a parody of what it is like to try to succeed in a segregated society. And, in this segregated world, economic success makes the African-American individual a target to both other African Americans and to whites who are threatened...