Segregation – prejudice – persecution: slavery had ended, but African-Americans were still forced to carve out a grim existence beneath the dispassionate stare of narrow-minded bigots. Soon, the Civil Rights Movement would gain momentum and drastically alter such social exclusion, but James Baldwin writes his story “Sonny’s Blues” before this transformation has occurred. In the style of other Post-Modernist writers of his day, Baldwin invents two brothers, Sonny and the narrator, who seem to have given up on finding meaning in their lives: escape, not purpose, is the solution for suffering. Although marginalized by white society, these men are still influenced by external standards – most noticeably our narrator. Using these two brothers as voices for a broader purpose, Baldwin develops conflicts within the story to depict a battle between the expectations of society (our unnamed narrator) and a free, African-American spirit (Sonny) as they each try to understand how to live in a changing world. Baldwin forces them to grapple with such difficult concepts as escape and suffering in an attempt to guide his own race toward the soothing balm of reconciliation.
The first conflict that Baldwin introduces is the clash between the narrator’s expectations and Sonny’s desires. As the more responsible and settled of the two brothers, the narrator is of course tasked with taking care of Sonny after his parent’s death. His mother pleads with him, “You got to hold on to your brother…and don’t let him fall, no matter what is looks like is happening to him…” (Baldwin 30). Seven years older than Sonny and working as an Algebra teacher, he seems to have escaped the dark depravity of Harlem and found a small measure of peace and happiness with his ...
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...t and even embrace their suffering so that their lives can continue. His reference to the cup of trembling is not merely a symbol of suffering, but also a reference to the sorrow that Jesus Christ willingly embraced – a sorrow with which Baldwin’s intended audience would have been very familiar. Although Sonny’s life is indeed about non-conformity and individualism, it is also about reconciliation: not just the reconciliation of two brothers, but also peace between the African community and the injuries (both mental and physical) that they had endured. The past will never vanish, no matter how stubbornly we try to escape it; Baldwin’s question to his readers is how we will allow it to shape our present and future.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
From the first lines of the story the reader gets the impression that Sonny’s brother tries to block out, ignore the truth about his brother and his troubles. The reaction the character has to the newspaper article about Sonny was: “It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that” (Baldwin 292). At this stage his relations with the younger brother remind of the way a teacher walks across the playground full of potentially troubled kids “though he or she couldn’t wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those boys out of their sight and off their minds” (Baldwin 293). Having some suspicions concerning Sonny’s ...
In James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the unspoken brotherly bond between the narrator and his younger brother Sonny is illustrated through the narrator’s point of view. The two brothers have not spoken in years until the narrator receives a letter from Sonny after his daughter dies. He takes this moment as an important sign from Sonny and feels the need to respond. While both Sonny and the narrator live in separate worlds, all Sonny needs is a brother to care for him while the narrator finds himself in the past eventually learning his role as an older brother.
James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” is the authors most studied and critically analyzed piece of literature. The majority of these analyses focus on the obvious themes of the book such as jazz music, the unnamed narrator, or the rift that divides Sonny and his brother. Little critique has ever gone into the biblical and religious themes that run throughout the story of “Sonny’s Blues.” Furthermore, it is even more astonishing that there is little critique given Baldwin has such a strong history with the world of Christianity.
Reilly, John M. " 'Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Community." James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Ed.Therman B. O'Daniel. Howard University Press. Washington, D.C. 1977. 163-169.
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" a pair of brothers try to make sense of the urban decay that surrounds and fills them. This quest to puzzle out the truth of the shadows within their hearts and on the streets takes on a great importance. Baldwin meets his audience at a halfway mark: Sonny has already fallen into drug use, and is now trying to return to a clean life with his brother's aid. The narrator must first attempt to understand and make peace with his brother's drug use before he can extend his help and heart to him. Sonny and his brother both struggle for acceptance. Sonny wants desperately to explain himself while also trying to stay afloat and out of drugs. Baldwin amplifies these struggles with a continuous symbolic motif of light and darkness. Throughout "Sonny's Blues" there is a pervasive sense of darkness which represents the reality of life on the streets of Harlem. The darkness is sometimes good but usually sobering and sometimes fearful, just as reality may be scary. Light is not simply a stereotypical good, rather it is a complex consciousness, an awareness of the dark, and somehow, within that knowledge there lies hope. Baldwin's motif of light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" is about the sometimes painful nature of reality and the power gained from seeing it.
Baldwin’s story presents the heart breaking portrayal of two brothers who have become disconnected through respective life choices. The narrator is the older brother who has grown past the depravity of his childhood poverty. The narrator’s profession as an algebra teacher reflects his need for a “black” and “white,” orderly outlook on life. The narrator believes he has escaped life’s sufferings until the death of his daughter and the troubling news about his brother being taken in for drug possession broadside him to the reality of life’s inevitable suffering. In contrast, his brother, Sonny has been unable to escape his childhood hardships and has ended up on the wrong side of the law. While their lives have taken ...
In "Sonny's Blues" James Baldwin presents an intergenerational portrait of suffering and survival within the sphere of black community and family. The family dynamic in this story strongly impacts how characters respond to their own pain and that of their family members. Examining the central characters, Mama, the older brother, and Sonny, reveals that each assumes or acknowledges another's burden and pain in order to accept his or her own situation within an oppressive society. Through this sharing each character is able to achieve a more profound understanding of his own suffering and attain a sharper, if more precarious, notion of survival.
James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” illustrates the inner struggle of breaking the hold of lifestyles unfamiliar to those normally accepted by society. Through the use of common fictitious tools such as plot, characters, conflict, and symbolic irony, Baldwin is able to explore the complex difficulties that challenge one in the acceptance of differences in one another. This essay will attempt to understand these thematic concepts through the use of such devises essential in fiction, as well as to come to an understanding of how the particular elements of fiction assist the author in exploring the conflict.
James Baldwin, author of Sonny’s Blues, was born in Harlem, NY in 1924. During his career as an essayist, he published many novels and short stories. Growing up as an African American, and being “the grandson of a slave” (82) was difficult. On a day to day basis, it was a constant battle with racial discrimination, drugs, and family relationships. One of Baldwin’s literature pieces was Sonny’s Blues in which he describes a specific event that had a great impact on his relationship with his brother, Sonny. Having to deal with the life-style of poverty, his relationship with his brother becomes affected and rivalry develops. Conclusively, brotherly love is the theme of the story. Despite the narrator’s and his brother’s differences, this theme is revealed throughout the characters’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and dialogue. Therefore, the change in the narrator throughout the text is significant in understanding the theme of the story. It is prevalent to withhold the single most important aspect of the narrator’s life: protecting his brother.
Several passages found throughout "Sonny's Blues" indicate that as a whole, the neighborhood of Harlem is in the turmoil of a battle between good and evil. The narrator describes Sonny's close encounters with the evil manifested in drugs and crime, as well as his assertive attempts at distancing himself from the darker side. The streets and communities of Harlem are described as being a harsh environment which claims the lives of many who have struggled against the constant enticement of emotional escape through drugs, and financial escape through crime. Sonny's parents, just like the others in Harlem, have attempted to distance their children from the dark sides of their community, but inevitably, they are all aware that one day each child will face a decisionb for the first time. Each child will eventually join the ranks of all the other members of society fighting a war against evil at the personal level so cleanly brought to life by James Baldwin. Amongst all the chaos, the reader is introduced to Sonny's special secret weapon against the pressures of life: Jazz. Baldwin presents jazz as being a two-edged sword capable of expressing emotions like no other method, but also a presenting grave danger to each individual who bears it. Throughout the the story, the reader follows Sonny's past and present skirmishes with evil, his triumphs, and his defeats. By using metaphorical factors such as drugs and jazz in a war-symbolizing setting, Baldwin has put the focus of good and evil to work at the heart of "Sonny's Blues."
The narrator in James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues”, at first glance seems to be a static character, trying to forget the past and constantly demeaning his brother’s choices in life. Throughout the story, readers see how the narrator has tried to forget the past. However, his attempt to forget the past soon took a turn. When the narrator’s daughter died, he slowly started to change. As the narrator experiences these changes in his life, he becomes a dynamic character.
Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Oxford Book of American Short Stories 1992: 409 - 439.
In conclusion, the short story "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin brings out two main themes: irony and suffering. You can actually feel the pain that Baldwin's characters experience; and distinguish the two different lifestyles of siblings brought up in the same environment. The older brother remaining nameless is a fabulous touch that really made me want to read on. This really piqued my interest and I feel it can lead to many discussions on why this technique was used. I really enjoyed this story; it was a fast and enjoyable reading. Baldwin keeps his readers thinking and talking long after they have finished reading his stories. His writing technique is an art, which very few, if any, can duplicate.
The short story Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin is written in first person through the narrator. This story focuses on the narrator’s brother sonny and their relationship throughout the years. This story is taken place in Harlem, New York in the 1950s. The narrator is a high school algebra teacher and just discovered his brother in the newspaper. This story includes the traditional elements to every story, which consist of the exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and the resolution.
“Sonny’s Blues” revolves around the narrator as he learns who his drug-hooked, piano-playing baby brother, Sonny, really is. The author, James Baldwin, paints views on racism, misery and art and suffering in this story. His written canvas portrays a dark and continual scene pertaining to each topic. As the story unfolds, similarities in each generation can be observed. The two African American brothers share a life similar to that of their father and his brother. The father’s brother had a thirst for music, and they both travelled the treacherous road of night clubs, drinking and partying before his brother was hit and killed by a car full of white boys. Plagued, the father carried this pain of the loss of his brother and bitterness towards the whites to his grave. “Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother.”(346) Watching the same problems transcend onto the narrator’s baby brother, Sonny, the reader feels his despair when he tries to relate the same scenarios his father had, to his brother. “All that hatred down there”, he said “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”(355) He’s trying to relate to his brother that even though some try to cover their misery with doing what others deem as “right,” others just cover it with a different mask. “But nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(355) The narrator had dealt with his own miseries of knowing his father’s plight, his Brother Sonny’s imprisonment and the loss of his own child. Sonny tried to give an understanding of what music was for him throughout thei...