Battle Royal Ralph Ellison Analysis

Battle Royal In the Battle Royal excerpt from the novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison uses the toxic combo of tobacco smoke and whiskey to symbolize people’s release of their corrupt and masked inner selves. The first occurrence of smoke and whiskey is when the narrator and his other black classmate were filed into a “big mirrored hall” headed to the ballroom, where the “battle” was going to take place. The fact that Ellison purposely chose for the hall to be “mirrored” is important because it foreshadows the “foggy […] cigar smoke” and “whiskey” as almost having self-reflective powers (18). This power is achieved by literal and realistic numbing effects of the smoke and whiskey, which can in turn skew one’s thought processes and one’s senses. …show more content…
Since the narrator and his other black classmates had numbed senses, they were oblivious to the true meaning behind that girl’s identity, hidden behind the “veil” of cigar smoke. The rigged system used her to bring out their corrupt selves by taunting their decency and innocence. This is equivalent to how, during the times of racial prejudice, white people always found ways to mess with and enrage the black minorities. However, most of the time, the blacks responded with nothing but a smile and waved it off, similar to what the narrator’s deceased grandfather delineated through his dying words. In addition, the men were turning into “intoxicated pandas […] completely hypnotized” by that woman (20). Her masked identity made the crowd more attracted to the paralleled unattainable freedom and controlling power that the black people could only dream

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