Social Confinement Ralph Ellison's exposure to the Jim Crow South in the 1950s inspired him to write Invisible Man (1952). Ellison addressed the nature of American and Black identities and their relationships. The protagonist represents the black society burdened by social discrimination. Ellison's use of metaphors, symbols, and diction to reveal black obedience is the only prescribed course of getting along in the segregated South. He does this by alluding to the invisible man at many objects such as a circus show in the battle royale and by using many different adjectives. Throughout the novel the invisible man is searching for himself, he encounters many different obstacles during this journey. Thus causing him to reveal how blacks were constantly oppressed in the South during the 1950s. Ellison reveals the unbalanced relationship between intellectual whites and inferior blacks in the Battle Royal setting. Battle Royal is an extended metaphor for the egalitarianism of white American society for blacks, and the entire setting resembles a circus show. Just like in a circus, everyone is gathered around an arena or on a ring to watch the animals, clowns and performers who entertain them. In this circus act it pushes to keep African Americans oppressed and on the run, everyone in the ring is stripped of their humanity, their dignity, their pride, and their right to have their own identity in society. All black males are sexually and physically humiliated as entertainment for community leaders. The protagonist and the other males arrive at the boxing match, “crowded in the servants' elevator” (Ellison 18). Each opponent is caged like a soul... middle of paper... he doesn't think for himself, but places the responsibility on others. As a result, Ellison reveals that the protagonist is a robot in white society and invisible in the black community. At the end of the novel the unnamed narrator isolates himself from society. Ellison does this to show that balance between the two races cannot be achieved. In the last chapter of Ellison's Invisible Man it appears that due to the degradation and invisibility with which the protagonist was burdened, he was unable to exist in such a restricted society. This confined society continually pushed blacks down in the city where they lived. By making blacks do what they want, whites continue to keep them in social confinement, with no room to progress in life..