Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal": Internal and External War

Introduction: A Life Shaped by an Antagonistic Setting

In Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal", the narrator states that "all my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was" (Ellison 442). The narrator admits that he accepted others' answers even though he knew they were not logical — and this compulsion to submit to an external force in a setting that is wholly antagonistic to him is the major theme that runs through the story. Indeed, the battle royal in which the young Black man is humiliated by being forced to box in a ring perfectly represents his internal and external struggles. He is obliged to pleasure the white elites and is compelled to deliver a speech in which he declares that the role of Black people is to submit and be deferential to whites — a speech for which he is awarded symbolic "entry" into their society, a world he is never really supposed to be at home in.

This essay will show how Ellison's short story is, as Janice Trecker notes, a representation of the "war" (169) that Black people must face both internally and externally in the setting of white society, and how that setting controls the internal and external life of the young narrator.

The Internal War: Truth, Identity, and the Journey Motif

Because the narrator's life is set within the world of an elite white society, the internal war waged within him is one of intellectual growth — a battle between truth and falsehood, and also a war for identity. The narrator states that he is "looking" for something, though he does not know what (Ellison 442). This sense of looking is reminiscent of the journey motif that runs through much of literature — a motif used to convey a sense of exploration, of a character who is searching for knowledge. The knowledge that the narrator of "Battle Royal" seeks is as yet unknown to him, but he is restless and not content to sit in ignorance. Thus, he asks for the opinions of others. He is polite and accommodating — but sometimes this accommodation comes at the expense of his own sense of self, self-worth, and reason.

The answers he receives from others on how to think and what to do are irreconcilable and contradictory. They do not actually provide solutions to the problems the narrator seeks to resolve. Thus, the internal war for truth that he wages is frustrated the more he tries to reconcile what he is receiving from others with what he knows is lacking within himself. He even echoes the words of his grandfather as though they were his own: "I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction" (Ellison 442). The grandfather is of course referring to the South and the post-Civil War era, which saw Black people taken advantage of by carpetbaggers and scalawags looking to exploit the unfortunate position of the newly freed but still marginalized Black community. By giving up his gun during Reconstruction, the grandfather recognizes that he has surrendered his right to bear arms, his right to sovereignty, his right to self-defense, self-assertion, and self-empowerment. He therefore views himself as a traitor to himself and to his own people. This story is passed down to the narrator, who seems haunted by it as though it were his own — as though it had been inherited into the internal struggle inside his own mind.

Conclusion: A War with No Reprieve

Setting impacts the narrator's life to such a degree that he really has no life of his own. Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal" is a story about war — the battle that a young Black man must face, both internally and externally, as he attempts to navigate his surroundings, which are controlled by people who are not his own and who do not respect him or wish him to succeed. They despise his very existence, and as a result he struggles within himself to find some truth, some answer to a question he does not even know how to ask. He struggles, too, to find a sense of self — to define who he is without reference to the external white elites to whom he bows.

His internal war is matched by the external battles he literally has to engage in to appease his handlers. He has to fight for their amusement and then sing their praises. All of this returns him to himself, and he realizes that he is never meant to find peace — for they do not wish it for him. He realizes that his struggle will go on, because in reality the war was lost the day his grandfather gave back his gun. As a foundational text of African American literature, "Battle Royal" remains a powerful meditation on the psychological and social dimensions of racial oppression in the United States.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. "Battle Royal."

Trecker, Janice. "The Great Migration: Art as History in Ralph Ellison and Jacob Lawrence." The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 169–185.