ry forward manner. Ellison describes an evening in which ten black men are first forced to fight blindfolded,and then made to crawl on an electrified carpet to get their cash prize. “Everyone foughthysterically.” Ellison writes, “It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else.No group fought together long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to fight eachother, were themselves attacked (Charters 453).” Directly after the fight the combatantsare forced to crawl over an electrified carpet to collect money. The men are forced todegrade themselves by crawling around trying to grab money, the whole time beingelectrocuted, to the amusement of the audience, there for a night of entertainment. Theseevents were not only an example of external violence, but internal as well. The externalviolence was also in a sense internal because the whole point of it was to degrade andembarrass the participants. The room full of white men where there simply to watch theblack men entertain them, fight for them, and suffer for them. The laughter of the crowdwas equally as violent as the fight. Instead of punches being thrown, words and emotionswere. The reader is given a good sense of how the narrator is being mentally beaten, aswell as physically, once he starts to give his speech, which was the reason he was at theevent in the first place. As soon as the speech began, the crowd yelled for the narrator tospeak up, so he was forced to practically yell the entire speech (even though most of thecrowd was not listening), directly after being in a grueling fight. “I spoke even louder inspite of the pain. But still they talked and still they laughed, as though deaf with cotton indirty ears (Charters 457).” In “This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen,” Tadeusz Borowski describesinternal violence with great ability. There is very little external, or physical violenceshown in the story, bu...
