"This is the law of the jungle, as old and true as heaven/Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games" Should Not Be Banned' ? Get an original essay And the wolf that keeps it may prosper, but the wolf that breaks it must die.”~Rudyard Kipling, “Law of the Jungle” [i]In his novel “The Invisible Man” Ralph Ellison presents, from a 1950s perspective, the struggle to become a black man in the United States. Ultimately, Ellison is trying to convey the struggle of forging an identity in a society that despises someone because of how they identify them. While the resulting invisibility is a powerful message, equally powerful is the journey through which the narrator matures into adulthood. In the novel's first chapter, "The Battle Royal," Ellison astutely overturns the conventional view of the "heart of darkness" as characteristic of Africa to symbolize the brutality of the American South. By selecting specific words, Ellison equates the African-American rite of passage into adulthood with the vicious rape of innocence by animalistic white men in their self-created jungle arena. Ellison inserts the rite of passage theme from the beginning of chapter 1, "The Battle Royal," when the narrator talks about his graduation day. This is effective because graduating from high school, especially in the 1950s and especially for men, is a symbolic rite of passage. It is also functional because it offers a public scene in which the men of the city must act in a certain way. The narrator delivers a speech proposing that humility is the secret to success. It is for this type of attitude, which is the character that this boy presents in public, that the "whitest men like lilies of the city" (1526) praise him. Ellison astutely juxtaposes this public rite of passage with a private one when the narrator is invited to give his speech again to a "gathering of the leading white citizens of the city" (1526). This repetition is clever because it forces the reader to notice the parallels of events; for example, once again the boy gives his speech and the white men gather. These similarities set the stage for comparison, which forces one to notice the stark contrast between what is important and how people act in the private versus public environment. The private scene is also important because, unlike the public high school diploma in which the diploma, an abstract and conventional proof of adulthood, demonstrates that the boy has become a man, tests the concrete and taboo principles of virility . Unlike the public sphere, where men act as they should and a document verifies that one is a man, the private sphere is made up of uninhibited men seeking a tough test of masculinity. Of note are the three main tests that white men are subjected to. the black kids. The first is a naked woman. The narrator responds to her in a way that shows that he is naive to the sight of naked women but, also, that he is aroused by her: "I felt a wave of guilt and irrational fear... Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself" (1527). Like African Americans, the white woman has historically been oppressed by white Southern men. Furthermore, like African Americans, by the 1950s white women had gained an abstract, public respect that was questionable in the private and practical sphere. The second test to which the boys are subjected is physical violence, during which they must all turn against each other to survive. Finally, they are forced to humiliate themselves in the interest of getting money from an electrified carpet..