Battle Royal

According to Kennedy’s An Introduction To Fiction, themes are “generally recurring subjects or ideas conspicuously evident in a literary work” (833). A literary work will usually disclose an idea that the reader is supposed to pick up on through various ways such as the title of the story, characters, and symbols. The first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “Battle Royal,” paves the road for revealing the general theme of invisibility throughout the story.
In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator informs his audience that he is invisible when he says “I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” After this self proclamation, one might ask in what ways the narrator of “Battle Royal” is invis...