“Battle Royal,” the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, has been interpreted as a symbolic protest against the unjust way in which society treats blacks and women but there is more to it than that. The narrator represents his family’s highest aspirations. From the deathbed speech of his grandfather onward, he dedicates himself to overcoming the problems that turned his grandfather and his father into “traitors,” black men who kept silent instead of protesting loudly against the injustices inflicted on them by whites. The narrator does his best to excel in his own life so that he won’t be part of that tradition and models his behavior after other people until he finds his truth. The main point of the story is that if he follows his grandfather’s advice, and tries to “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree on ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swollen you till they vomit or bust wide open,” he will end up as degraded as the leading white citizens of his town are.
The first example of that is the woman who was hired to entertain the men at the dinner. Before the fighting begins the narrator and the other nine young men who are participating in the battle royal are made to watch a stripper perform for the men at the gathering. The way the narrator describes her makes it clear that she is a beautiful queen who has given up her self-respect just to make money: “The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, … the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt,” he says and notes that she has been tattooed (branded) with an American flag. While the men are tossing her up and down her eyes meet the narrator’s and he notices that “above her red, fixed-smiling lips” there is “terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror,” the fear that the citizens will completely lose their self-control and will swallow her whole.
The town’s leading citizens all represent noble professions: doctors, teachers, fire chiefs, and the school superintendent. When they were young they must have had ideals and values but now that they are at the top of their town’s hierarchy they have descended into a life of drink, voyeurism, and brutal pleasures. The most degraded of all is Jackson, the man who wants to injure the battle royal fighters after they are blindfolded and who even threatens to kill “him a coon.” He is surrounded by red-faced, bloated men with “lips loose and drooling,” whose idea of pleasure now is to watch young men fight one another. These are the men who have come together to hear the narrator’s speech just to hear him say that for blacks “humility was … the essence of progress,” a speech that would confirm their sense of superiority. The point the narrator is making is that he can become like them but they cannot become like him because no matter what else he says in his speech, this is the only point that gets their interest.
The ten black men involved in the battle royal are strong, virile, and young, everything the leading citizens are not, and therefore it pleases them to humiliate the young men by confronting them with the blonde queen, then sending them into battle against one another until only two are left standing. They turn on each other for gold coins (which later turn out to be brass tokens) even though they know that white society has always turned blacks against one another. In that way, the desire for money is shown to be stronger than their sense of morality or self-respect, and it shows once again that cooperation with the leading citizens only leads to personal degradation while making the citizens feel more superior.
The award of a full college scholarship will help lift the narrator out of his environment of poverty and discrimination to help other African Americans succeed. He believes that “only these men could judge truly my ability” and is moved by their gesture. However, to accept it he must first assure the white men that he knows his place and that he would never use a phrase like “social equality.” Like his grandfather and his father, he too will teach other Negroes to be traitors if he continues on this path.