Something that struck me during my reading of Invisible Man happened before I even got to the actual story. I didn’t realize why the term “Battle Royale” stuck out to me in the introduction, written by Ellison in 1981, but after reading through more of the novel, and spending all of Spring break in a high-school for observations, I figured it out.
At the end of the introduction Ellison explains how the first chapter was shown to the editor of the magazine Horizon, and that brought an intimidation for him because he worried the “‘battle royal’ scene, might well be the novel’s only incident of interest.” Another very popular, and much more modern, book came to mind when thinking of battle royales. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the most popular interpretation of a “battle royal” in modern literary fiction. The book released ten years ago and spawned massively successful film adaptations of the source materials, and thus introduced a whole new generation to the concept of “battle royales.”
Why does this have to do with going to high-school during our Spring break? Well building off the success of The Hunger Games and that concept, a highly popularized video game “Fortnite: Battle Royale” has invaded the lives of almost every student at the school I observed. Even if someone did not play the game themselves, they watched someone else play it, or knew of its significant presence in daily life. Students were bragging to each other about their experiences in this actualized “Battle Royale” that they can participate in. Sixty-six years after being published, Invisible Man regains its relevance to modern society and our society’s newfound obsession with these deeper explorations into battle royales.
Ellison was worried that this scene would be the only area of interest within the book, and now a video game is making millions of dollars based of that sole idea. The game pits you, either by yourself or in a team of up to four, against a hundred strangers online. People from all around the world connect online and duke it out in a virtual arena to win this constant battle royale. Ellison’s scene has grown bigger than just being a scene in a book, as, fifty years later, it seems to be the foundation for the whole of The Hunger Games, and ten years after that the idea spurned into a hugely successful video game.
America’s youth is so caught up in this game that during class time there are students who pull out their smartphones and play it under their desks. On top of this, when we would go as a class to the media center or a lab to work on essays, I could always count on there being two or three students who downloaded the game onto their computers and played rather than wrote. Battle royales might not be uniquely America, but due to the American inception within Ellison’s novel, I believe it is fair to attribute some of the popularity to Ellison.
Fascinating–I wonder how the video game you describe could be read / critiqued in the same way that Ellison seems to use the scene as almost an allegory of pre-WWII race relations. In professional wrestling, the battle obviously serves as a mere audience-distraction and entertainment. The audience has no control. In Ellison’s battle royal scene–and in hunger games and the video game you describe–the audience is precisely in control, orchestrating what is, in the video game at least, the illusion of power and agency.