In the "Battle Royal" chapter of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, what are some examples of tone, diction, theme, and irony that represent how...

The effects of the past on the narrator’s perception of
the present are particularly important in the “Battle Royal” section of Chapter 1 of
Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible Man. In fact, in the very
second sentence of this section, the narrator reports
that

All my
life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me
what it was.

This statement
explicitly emphasizes the influence of the past as a major theme of the book. It also
suggests that the present and future can partly escape the influence of the past if one
is willing to listen clearly to oneself.

The past as an
influence on the present occurs elsewhere in this section, such as in the following
instances:

• when the narrator comments on his
  new-found lack of shame about the fact that his grandparents had been
  slaves.


• when the narrator’s grandfather, on his deathbed,
  advises his son (the narrator’s father) to be subversively defiant in his relations with
  whites.  Thus, one generation attempts to pass along an assertive attitude to the next,
  and the narrator himself seems influenced by his grandfather’s dying words. Indeed, the
  narrator meditates during the course of a long paragraph (very early in the “battle
  royal” section) on the meaning and influence of his grandfather’s
  words.


• The narrator feels torn between obeying his
  complacent parents and heeding his secretly defiant grandfather. Thus he feels torn by
  loyalty to the recent past and loyalty to the more distant
  past.


• The narrator feels the influence of the words and
  ideals of Booker T. Washington, an important figure of the past, but he also feels
  skeptical about Washington’s cooperative attitude toward
  whites.


• The narrator is influenced by the long custom of
  having black boys fight each other in a battle royal.
  


• The narrator is influenced by another custom related to
  the battle: the custom “for the two men left in the ring to slug it out for the winner’s
  prize.” This is a custom of which the other young African Americans are aware, but of
  which the narrator is ignorant. Ellison thus shows that ignorance of customs (that is,
  ignorance of the ways of the past) can be dangerous to the person who displays such
  ignorance. Even more danger (and pain) results from the narrator’s ignorance of the
  custom of making the winners of the fight pick up their winnings from an electrified
  rug.


• The degrading behavior forced upon the narrator
  during and after the fight is made all the more degrading when he must quote the words
  of Booker T. Washington, who celebrated cooperation between the races. The realities of
  the narrator’s present contrast bleakly with the ideals extolled by Washington in the
  past.