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Compare and Contrast Battle Royal

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Literature: A Reflection of Life

June 20, 2014

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ” That's powerful. Looking back, how often have you read a piece of literature that really does reveal truth? In the stories “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison and “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne I came to a staggering feeling of empathy when it comes to discrimination.

In “Battle Royal” you are taken back to some time in the 1920s or 1930s after the Civil war when slaves were finally free and believed they were equal. In the south and in this story we know that wasn't quite the case. Although he tells the story, you never learn the narrator's name. You can tell he's struggling to find his own identity and is invisible due to his race. There is a constant reoccurring theme of racism and a total insecurity of individual identity.

The narrators grandfather was a slave that was freed. On his deathbed he counsels the narrators father to undermine the whites with “yeses and grins” and “agree 'em to death and destruction” He felt like a traitor to his race and himself by following that advice, but it is what kept him alive. This advice creates a strong fear for the narrator to, in one instance, fight for his life. In other instances the poor boy is stripped of his pride due to his fear of the white men.

It's actually quite heart-wrenching to feel the narrator's inequalities. In the beginning of his fight, there's a blonde dancer who, it would seem, is also struggling for her equality as a woman. I honestly almost didn't recognize it because I was so nervous for what was coming, the actual battle. This really gave me the feeling Ellison was referencing the fight for equality for woman along with black people.

I was somewhat relieved towards the end of this story, due to the narrator having a dream about his grandfather. Towards the end of the dream he opens an envelope from his grandfather that has a document that says “To Whom It May Concern . . . Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” taking the story right back to the prejudices against him just for the color of his skin.

Reading “The Birthmark”, the story is an ominous romantic story about a scientist named Aylmer and his new bride Georgiana in the late 1700s. The story takes place in Britain. Georgiana is exceptionally beautiful, other than her one fatal flaw which just so happens to be a little more than skin deep.

Georgiana's received many compliments from males who consider her tiny, hand-shaped birthmark to be charming. Once she marries Aylmer, his hatred for the mark makes her grow to hate it. They are both willing to risk her life to remove it, which seems inevitable, since it seems to reach all the way to her heart. Even though Aylmer's grubby yet compassionate assistant Aminadab compliments the mark and says he would NEVER remove it, they try anyway.

It's somewhat sickening how fear of loss can drive a woman to be so eager to please that she would risk her life to make a man happy. Georgiana's discrimination based on her looks and something she couldn't control is crushing. Science versus nature always seems to be a pretty bad idea, though Especially when it comes to striving for perfection and the foolishness of such a thing.

“The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object.” In this explanation you can see Aylmer is recognize that although she seems perfect, Georgiana is subject to all the same terrible things other people are. It makes her “mortal” and subject to sin.

Both the narrator in “Battle Royal” and Georgiana in “The Birthmark” had experienced discrimination. One had to deal with it because of his color, the other because of her looks. Although the time was so far apart, the issues the two characters deal with are so similar.

Literature has such a great way of portraying experiences in a compelling way. You feel things the way the character experiences them. The best part is, you have an image in your mind building up as the story goes along so the impact is immediate. How often does the new impact you that way? You watch it and move on with your life.

Being heavily tattooed I'm constantly judged. If I have too many tattoos showing some people think I'm a criminal. Some people assume tattoos mean I ride a motorcycle. Some people actually attribute them to promiscuity. Some people have their mom telling them early in life not to worry about what people have to say. I guess it's a good thing we don't see everyone's thoughts in the third person like “The Birthmark”. Looks like Mom was right.

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