battle royal

While reading Ellison’s short story battle royal I felt disgusted. I do realize that yes, this story took place in a much different time period and that evidently this story is fiction but that did not take away from the image that the author had painted in my head. It was really hard and sad to imagine the kind innocence of the main character and the way he was treated. All he wanted to do was give a graduation speech which is something he must have been so proud to do yet when he shows up he is basically forced to fight 9 of his classmates in order to put on a show for a bunch of white oppressive drunk males. As if that is not humiliating enough, he then has to fight them all over again to receive their payments which have been laid out on an electric rug. After the grueling day, all the boys want is their money and instead they’re electrocuted when they touch the rug. It is a second effort of humiliation by the white men of the meeting and that is when my heart really sunk. It was such a cruel gesture. It is only then, all battered and bruised, that the narrator gets to recite his speech. I thought that it was such a brave thing to do but i told myself that i would have never gone through all that just to recite a speech. But that was how things were so it puts things in perspective and makes you appreciate the respect we receive today.

the mark on the wall

In my opinion, this story was really strange but from what i hear, Virginia Woolf is a really unique and strange writer which is what apparently makes her so good and interesting to some but boring to others. When i was done reading the story, I was left thinking “Okay what was the point of that?” I think in order to understand the meaning of her text you have to really deeply analyze it and hope that it is a symbol for something or you will easily mistake it for a weird story. Upon my research, i discovered that there was a deeper meaning to this story, as expected. It can be said that the mark on the wall that the character is seeing is a symbol for the meaning of life and you never really know just what it is until the very of your life when you’re about to die. The character does not know what the mark is until the very end of the story when someone interrupts her by saying they were going out to buy a newspaper and they mention that there is a snail on the wall. She can not accurately define the mark on the wall until the very end of the story just like how some people discover the meaning of life just as their dying.

Mark on the Wall

I honestly believe that some authors write stories just to create something new. For Woolf, this story literally did not have a plot, character development or background of any kind. I feel that Woolf basically wrote this just to challenge all aspects of writing. Although I respect this, it did not really leave the reader with anything. The title is frankly the plot: A man sees a mark on the wall and sits and stares at it and it ends up being a snail. That is all. Its actually quite frustrating to read pages and pages of something with no meaning. I guess Woolf’s primary concern in this short story is consciousness since the whole story is the character’s mind wondering off into snippets of stories. The long, flowing sentences contribute to the idea of thoughts as well as the continuous punctuation of dashes and ellipses. There are no complete thoughts in this story, only fragmented ideas. Woolf is definitely using a stream of consciousness technique throughout the story. In fact, because this story is ultimately about a character’s thoughts, the story becomes completely subjective. This can lead to the narrator becoming unreliable. An example of the unreliable narrator in the Mark on the Wall is when the story begins with “Perhaps it was…” The word perhaps sets the entire story and takes away the credibility of the narrator from the start. Therefore, the reader can not really rely on the narrator for anything.

Week 8 Battle Royal

This short story was sad but had enough action in it to make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next. Battle Royal is a short story portraying how racist society was back. The most important people in the town do terrible things to the narrator because he is black. I can’t believe the narrator went through as much as he did just to give a speech to the important people in down. What they did to the narrator and the other people in the room was basically torture. Only one person in the audience was nice to the narrator and gave him an a scholarship to a black college. I feel the theme was obviously about how African Americans were mistreated. The attitude of the townspeople stand out the most and set the tone of the short story. The fact that the narrator was not pissed but was happy at the end shows how normal this treatment was more them at this time.

Blackberry Winter

I loved this story. It was suspenseful and mysterious which are the kind of stories/novels I love. The weather “blackberry winter” in June added a mysterious and dark setting along with the plot of the man with the knife. It was so typical of him to think that when the man was coming, he went back and thought if he went in the house now, his mom would not notice if he was barefoot. That’s a typical child thinking because any grown up person would know not to worry for such things when there is a strange man outside the house. There were twists in the story. The man seemed nice but he had a knife but then he did not really threaten the boy. It was just mysterious and it was scary because we did not know what he was going to do next with the knife and etc. But then when the kid was following him, he told him to stop and in the end, as an adult, he makes the comment that he did follow him all throughout the years. So he became him in a way. The ending was just very deep and emotional that he said he did follow him. It was a good ending. It was a good story overall.

Battle Royal

In the short story “Battle Royal”, Ralph Ellison tells a story of an african american man and in intense fight that he is a part of. What is so interesting about this is the author goes into such excruciating detail that it is actually like the reader is able to see the sweat dripping off the fighters’ faces. The life of an African American at this point in time was not an easy one. The amount of discrimination was intense and hard to understand if you were not experiencing it first hand. One could say that the description of the fight is symbolism for the social battle that these people went through every day. By describing the intensity of the fight the author is actually giving a literal blow by blow description of the oppression the African americans went through. It is both horrifying to read, but the description and connection the author has made is beautiful. For someone to take such an off the wall approach to talking about equal rights shows how intellectual they really are. Not only was he smart for doing this, but he made it so he never truly took a stance on the subject. This was very intelligent and readers saw it as a description of a fight rather than a political statement on the subject. Ralph Ellison is a very intelligent writer and I believe that this short story shows not only his intellect, but is a statement on his good character. 

The Hitchhiking Game

I’ve noticed that the stories we’ve read which were written after 1920 have many underlying psychological elements. As opposed to developing their characters with the plot choices, the authors develop their characters through their mannerisms. In “The Destructors,” Mike has changes his mouthy behavior because of a time when someone threatened him. In “The Hitchhiking Game,” the young man is “aware of the law of universal transience.” I originally didn’t know what this meant, so I looked it up. I found out that the law basically implies that time passes quickly and you should enjoy the moment while you can. This is why the young man “enjoyed her moments of shyness” and also “because they distinguished her from the women he’d met before.” Eventually, Kundera he author details the personality of the girls when she explains, “she knew that her shyness was ridiculous and old-fashioned.” The narrator then reveals how complexly self-conscious the girl is: “she always got shy in advance at the thought of how she was going to get shy.” The speaker then describes the coping mechanism the girl uses to attempt to combat her shyness, “she invented a special course in self-persuasion: she would repeat to herself that at birth every human being received one out of the millions of rooms in an enormous hotel. Consequently, the body was fortuitous and impersonal, it was only a readymade, borrowed thing.” It’s likely that the reader feels a strong sense of pity for the girl when her psychological issues are detailed.

The Destuctors

The appeal of this story, to me, was the Greene’s writing style. I love how he details certain parts of the story. For example,  he develops the character of Blackie in this passage about T. breaking into Old Misery’s house: ” He was just, he had no jealousy, he was anxious to retain T. in the gang if he could… ‘If you’d broken in,” he said sadly — that indeed would have been an exploit worthy of the gang. This excerpt reveal’s that Blackie’s character was worthy of a great leader. He hoped that he could maintain the stability of the clan by keeping T. in the group, but he understood that the gang had unwritten rules which were closely followed. Greene then makes a strong emotional connection with the reader when he makes his next extensive description. “It was the end of his leadership…. He took a flying kick at the car and scraped a little paint off the rear mudguard. Beyond, paying attention to him than to a stranger, the gang had gathered round T.; Blackie was aware of the fickleness of favour.” The reader would likely react in a somewhat sympathetic affection for Blackie. At first, he potentially had the power to remove T. from the gang immediately, without letting T. have a fair chance to explain himself. However, Blackie was virtually overthrow by T. soon after. Since gangs operate completely on favor, this method of writing lets us infer that favor is fickle, and so are gangs.

Sonny’s Blues

This is probably one of, or is, my favorite story of the semester.  James Baldwin literally creates a musical piece with this short story, his use of short quick sentences next to long, played out sentences, splattered with plosives and smoothed with liquids, acts as a series of instruments playing this one song “Sonny’s Blues.”  What I love most about this story is this tension between the right and left minded people, highlighted by The Narrator and Sonny, respectively.  Sonny is the extreme version of not knowing what he wants, except happiness, a complete sacrifice to the moment and to present emotions.  Much the same way, the narrator abides by a strict set of personal rules he has logically created for himself, however he too, does not know why.  Observing these two function as together is a view into two different types of people and how they deal with stress, and the weight of the everyday quotidian.  I particularly enjoyed the language and diction of the whole story, it was literally a “cool” read, and the subject matter really helped me visualize how beautifully music and writing can intertwine.  It’s not informal, but casual, a story an English Professor as well as a heroine addict can read, enjoy, understand, and reflect upon.  The music gives it universality, as well the interaction between these two very different minds that love each other unconditionally.

Battle Royal

This short story had one of the best descriptions of a fight I’ve ever read,  Ralph Ellison does an insane job of describing something in tremendous detail that happens as fast as an ass-beating.  I always find it hard to describe something that passes so fast in such detail and so on point.  It’s not like you can meditate and observe the literary merit of getting whooped during the process, and afterwards you’re no doubt way to shaken up to reflect on the experience intellectually.  But Ellison did the perfect job, either that or he’s gotten into a shit load of fights.  The whole tone leads me to believe the latter, the way he describes getting beaten up is with a cool, almost stoic tone, his mind is obviously somewhere totally different from where his body is being whomped.  This segways perfectly into my next point, I particular enjoyed the underlying theme of balance between mind and body portrayed in this story.  This main character puts his body through all this physical torment and strain in order to exhibit the power of his mind.  It is a beautiful view of a colored boy literally fighting for his rights to be respected as a powerful mind.  The actual battle royale is symbolic of the struggle everyone has to go through, especially a black person in this time period trying to get acknowledged for something academic.