Weekly Blog

This week in class we read "Battle Royal" and "The Lottery". To start I personally enjoyed "The Lottery" better, even though it wasn't right until the end until I understood what was going on. However, once I figured it out I thought the story was great, it was a very exciting twist at the end of this story. After reading it through once the second read made much more sense and I was able to really piece it all together. Then, after the second reading I started to look for the hidden meaning, and after realizing this story was written in 1950's, my conclusion was that this story was all about Nazi Germany and how dangerous it can be when people conform, and are conditioned to believe things are all right, even if something is terribly unjust. The comparison would be how every year they needlessly killed someone all because someone told them to, just as the Nazis did to the Jews.

The next story was "Battle Royal" and this was all about a young black man who was forced to fight in front of all the white people, for their entertainment. After he won the fights he then received a scholarship. At the beginning of the story the main characters grandfather talks about how he was a slave, or puppet and no one understood him. But as the story goes on you come to realize that what he meant was all his life he was just like a toy for the rich white people, doing what he was told just to get by. Which eventually the grandson ends up doing in he fight, having to entertain the white man just to make it by and get that scholarship. I thought this story was pretty straightforward and was clearly about how even after slavery was abolished, that for a long time African-Americans were taken advantage of at the expense of white men and their entertainment.