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Battle Royal is a story of fairness, of the idea that all men were created equal, and therefore should be treated in such a manor. It is also about the blindness of racism. The conflict in the story arrives early through the narrators grandfathers dying words, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I gave up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, agree them to death and destruction, let them swallow you till they vomit or bust wide open. Learn it to the young ones” (209). These words would haunt the narrator for the rest of his life. Through the years, the narrator matures into an educated model citizen: was this what his grandfather warned him about? Or was he living with his head in the lion’s mouth? When the protagonist graduates high school we are given light of a speech that he made regarding the importance of humility, but he himself does not believe in his own words.
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