In “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison, the narrator is an African American young man growing up and trying to find his place in a time when social equality was only dreamt about. When his grandfather was on his deathbed he advised his family to “overcome ‘em with yeses and undermine ‘em with grins” (Hawthorne 553) and from then on, the narrators life is framed by his grandfather’s last words. Although it takes the narrators whole childhood and the biggest test of his life to figure out what this means
Ralph Ellison and Amy Tan, both well-known American minority writers, explore the lives of the minority races in America in their notable works of fiction. For instance, in Ellison’s “Battle Royal” and Tan’s “Rules of the Game”, both stories taken from the writers’ novels, the narratives explore the experiences of a protagonist belonging to a minority group living in America. On surface, the minority experiences of the protagonists of the two stories seem dissimilar, with the invisible man in Ellison’s