After today’s class, I was thinking about the battle royale scene and what we had said the meaning of the scene was to the story, and I wanted to elaborate a little more on what I had said toward the end of class.
In response to Professor Gold’s question regarding the use of irony in the story, I said that the scene was ironic because even after all that happened to the narrator, all he had seen and been put through, he still regarded the audience–the rich white men in the crowd–as civilized. He still saw them as being better than himself and a group to which he should be, for lack of a better term, subservient.
In the end, however, they still helped him; they still gave him a scholarship; they still did “right” by him in their own sick and twisted way. I was beginning to wonder if Ellison includes this scene to give an idea of the type of bigotry a black person encountered, and how it might not even feel like bigotry if it is indeed a simple fact of life. They are white, in a sense the owners of Monopolated Light & Power, and if a black person wants to “get ahead” this is exactly the type of treatment they should expect.
Although they are willing to do “right” by him, the right or advancement comes with a price. In the narrator’s case, he had to “entertain” them, like Armstrong maybe, unaware of what he was doing. He doesn’t, at this point in the story, see it that way. He doesn’t see that he is being degraded, since he–representative of black people in society–has always been degraded.
I think it’s important to remember that the battle royale scene is the first one in which we see the invisible man coming into contact with white culture. I’d say that the scene with his grandfather represents his earliest educational experience, but this one runs a close second.
The scene is an absolute farce, and the narrator and his friends are the targets of the farce. He’s there to give a talk about “social responsibility”; it’s worthwhile to think about what that phrase might mean to the audience and to the invisible man. The audience is willing to “help him out,” but only so long as the invisible man remains within the social role that the audience, and white culture more generally, has staked out for him: “We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times” (31) they tell him. That place, as you point out, is one of humiliation and entertainment: even as they give him a scholarship to college, they give him an education of their own in the ways of the world.
All of this, of course, speaks to the hypocrisy of “separate but equal.” That is the greater societal farce that Ellison seems to be targeting.
Comment by Prof. Matt — March 21, 2007 @ 12:54 pm