Cooperative reading: Invisible Man

Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's masterpiece. The first chapter was originally published as a short story; and if you rhink how it works with unity of effect, it certainly can be read as such (though of course, it is later developed in the rest of the novel).
What you'll find below are the questions which you prepared in class, plus a few I have added, to help you go over "Battle Royal" again. These questions are meant for you to study for the second mid-term test; it is not necessary that you answer and turn them in now.

1. What search was the narrator involved twenty years earlier?
2. What answer has he found? How can you explain it?
3. Why is the narrator ashamed?
4. in the 2nd paragraph, he says "our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days." What does he mean? Which "war" does he refer to? Why has he been a traiytor? Mention examples from the chapter in which we see him as a "traitor."
5. What was the gist fo the speech he delivered on his graduation day?
6. What was the battle royal? How is it relevant to the story's themes?
7. What is the white audience's attitude towards what happens in the ring?
8. What does the battle roal symbolize, in relation to the fighters' attitudes towards each other, and to the attitudes of the audience towards them?
9. Why is it so important for the narrator to deliver his speech?
10. What is meant by "social responsibility" and "social equality" in his speech? How do the white memebrs of the audience react to each of these ideas?
11. Explain the words that the M.C. tells the narrator as he hands him the prize briefcase.
12. What is the relevance of the garndfather's words on his deathbed? And of the dream the narrator has at the end of the chapter?