homework for tuesday

I think Ralph Ellison's short story "The Battle Royale" displays a significant historical perspective on what it was like for a black man living in a white man's wolrd. The historical context for the themes are that because the narrator is treated like animal because he is black their is a theme of identity. Meaning the narrator is weak in a sense that he doesn't know who his true self is. We see this when he constantly is trying to think of his grandfather's advice. The cultural background of this story is how brutal and unkind white people treated blacks because they thought they were superior to them and how the blacks were forced to live in a society where they had to accept this. In society today they're not familiar to me because times have changed and their have beens laws against segregation and races are viewed equal in today's world. But of course race will always have some issue in the world. In the story a white man yells, "let me at those black sonsabitches" and it is clear that their is cultural/historical clues in the story that lead me to believe that the white men are treating the black men like animals and forcing them to fight as a way of entertainment for them to see the black men fall in fights. If I or someone were to find out more important cultural/historical knowledge on this story I would go back to the book it came from and skim the other chapters to get more of a specific idea of the entire story.