Idealism To Realism In Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal

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Idealism to Realism: The Journey Through Conformity In Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison, there are two major themes that are serious issues in today’s society, conformity, which people’s beliefs and or behaviors being influenced by others and realization, which is coming to understand of something and or making or giving the appearance of reality. A plethora of people today are conforming to attempt appeasing the people who look at them as inferior and are not realizing who they are in fact becoming. In this story the narrator, makes a huge transformation as he moves from being idealistic, the tendency to envision things in perfect, but in an unrealistic way, to being realistic and seeing things as they really are. The narrator begins…show more content…
He can barely talk because of the injuries he sustained during his pre-speech entertainment for the white folks. Throughout his entire speech he has people yelling at him and whenever he “uttered a word of three or more syllables” they would ask him to repeat it. That is demeaning, and suggesting he is unintelligent and cannot say words that seem complex and long. After all that they put him through when he finished his speech, “there was a thunderous applause” (810). And then the man that brought him there said some really nice things, including “he’ll lead his people in the proper paths” (811). Although this to me seemed nice, I think it had a somewhat hidden message also. I think when the white man said it that, he actually means that he will have African American’s following him to impress the white man on the proper path. I think that the proper path he will lead them on is one of the complete opposite, now that he is realizing what is actually going on around…show more content…
Prejudice was a good topic to talk about and to be recognized, and Battle Royal fit the toll perfectly. I had the idea of prejudice, but I was able to elaborate on it more with the help of my classmates and professor. I would also like to acknowledge and thank my friend Christopher Martin for reading over my paper and giving helpful insights. I always find that a peer knows how to understand what one is trying to say or help to make sense of it. He offered a lot of help and was willing to make notes on my paper to attempt at helping me make my paper the best it could possibly be. I really appreciate his time and effort and definitely took in to account some of the great and helpful feedback he gave me. Another person I would also like to shortly thank is Professor Miller. She took the time out of her busy schedule to sit down and have a conference with me and go over any questions. It made it easier to figure out exactly what she was looking for in my paper. It clarified some questions I had and made me realize that I can actually write a good paper when I put my mind to it and take the same time and effort as she does to correct our papers and apply to writing my own
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