Battle Royal or the Invisible Man (Style)

Style

Point of View and Narration

The narration is in first person, addressing the reader directly with a direct and honest tone implying a certain naivete. The narrator is most capable of conveying his confusion. His sense of accomplishment is rendered pathetic by his constant inability to take offense at the inhumane treatment he endures at the hands of his “benefactors.” By rendering scenes of physical and psychological violence to the reader in forceful detail and lyrical immediacy, one expects a statement of anger and resistance. Instead, the reader alone seems to understand the demeaning implication of the battle royal as the narrator progresses toward the ultimately triumphant scholarship award. The final mention of the narrator’s dream suggests that this absence of indignation is indeed ironic, an irony that is wound more tightly in the novel as a whole.

Setting

The story takes place around eighty-five years after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, in approximately 1947. It is important that the narrator lives in the South, where slavery played a crucial role in sustaining the economic system of plantation farming until the Civil War. In the days after slavery’s abolition, African Americans were prevented from becoming economically stable by the white community. The town of the story reflects a fundamental hierarchy in which white men are those with economic, political, judicial and educational authority. The hotel where the battle royal takes place represents the extent of this white power. It is significant that once inside the room where the events take place, one is either there as an audience member or an entertainer. The audience is composed only of white men being entertained by their perverse manipulation of the young African-American men and the “magnificent blonde” stripper.

Symbol and Images

The narrator’s direct statement of the scene seems too simplistic given the frenzied events unfolding and the immediate impact of these events on the narrator himself. This incongruity invites the reader to see in these discrete images a broader significance, reaching to comment on the more general social dynamic that produces the story’s violence.

The image of the circus occurs at the beginning and ending of the story. The grandfather urges the narrator to live his life with his head in the lion’s mouth, and in the narrator’s final dream he sits next to his grandfather at a circus. These images might symbolize the fundamental uncertainty of life. Whereas the conventional ideas of respectably working, earning and raising a family imply a clear logic, the circus is a spectacle that makes everything both funny and unpredictable. The circus is also a place of masquerade and of power reversals, where clowns enact skits that make those who are supposed to be in charge appear foolish. The circus is also a place that uses the illusion of danger — lions, canons, the tightrope — to dramatic effect. By equating life with a circus, the narrator’s dreams seem to enforce the irony of his aspiration to be a respectable figure like Booker T. Washington.

The fight is a central symbol, representing the harsh reality of the marketplace for African Americans. The physical brutality reflects the reality of violence directed against Black men by white society in the North and the South. The scene of the schoolmates being confronted by the stripper represents the ways in which racism against African Americans was expressed sexually. The white, male audience’s lurid interest in watching both the stripper and the young men’s terrified reaction to her naked body are poignant and disturbing expressions of how deeply oppressive racism can be.

Structure

The story is presented as a retrospective, told from an unknown vantage point in the present, well after the narrated events have concluded. From this vantage point, the narrator remembers his life before he left for college in which two specific events occurred: the death of his grandfather and his participation in the battle royal. This reminiscence incorporates an historical depth by using the grandfather’s life to reach back eighty-five years, thus connecting the narrated events to a national history of slavery’s abolition and the eventual abandonment of Reconstruction. The reminiscence also suggests that the narrator may have grown into a more accurate understanding of these past events.