The Struggle For Survival In Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal

In Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal”, Ellison tells the story of a young man struggling to realize his role in a society ruled by a white supremacist. Throughout his struggle, the narrator encounters and contemplates what would be his best chance at achieving success and surviving life as a black individual. The story narrates this character’s journey of learning how to adapt and survive in an environment where he does not have any deciding where to put his faith. Ellison conveys the message that as an objective way to achieve success in a white-supremacist society is to fight unarmed through realization of your power/place in society, submission, and endurance.
Ellison shows us in the story that in order to survive in this war of life, one must know one's place and one's power. The narrator’s grandfather states he had been” a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I gave my gun back in the Reconstruction”(Ellison 315). This shows how the grandfather understood that he was unable to fight in the war against whites because he knew that he was unprepared and disadvantaged. The character knows that logically there’s a greater chance of winning the war if they fight for the more prepared and advantaged side. The narrator struggles with his grandfather’s ideology throughout the
The audience is first introduced to this idea when the narrator’s grandfather dies and tells him about the importance of noncompliance. The narrator then feels entitled to this notion because he believes that it will secure his success and in view of the fact that it is all that he has been accustomed to. This idea is also presented again when the narrator quotes Booker T. Washington in his speech after the battle royal. Even though Ellison might not view submissiveness in a positive way, he still wants the readers to know the power/importance of it and the disadvantages that come with it as