Personal Renewal in Sonny's Blues

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Nothing is Impossible

Your youngest brother or sister is thousands of miles away from you and their life might be in jeopardy. This knowledge is known because of newspaper articles that discuss your sibling’s difficulty with a strong addiction to life taking drugs such as heroin. Illegal drugs like this have been known to take the lives of millions of people. With these facts put in place, there is a chance that the drug user identified as your brother or sister may lose their sight of a healthy lifestyle and never live up to their full potential. As the older brother or sister, you may think of a variety of ideas such as whether their alright, how this all happened, and if there is something you can do to help. This predicament was displayed in a famous short story called "Sonny’s Blues" written by James Baldwin. As a person, one must either choose to take on these problems or ignore them. The older brother known as the narrator throughout the whole story took on these extra responsibilities in order to help transform his younger brother’s life. The younger brother named Sonny portrayed strong evidence throughout the story that he was able to renew his life through his love and passion for blues music. However, Sonny is not the only one who goes through self-renewal. The older brother also renews his life by realizing what is really important to him and how to be a genuine brother.

Sonny’s jazz performance in front of his older brother at the end of the story is loaded with evidence that they both have renewed their lives. This proof is found in the final pages of Baldwin’s excellent literature of “Sonny’s Blues”. At the start of Sonny’s performance, he was a little nervous because of his older brother’s presence along with n...

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...t and make better decisions to conclude the rest of their lives.

In this enjoyable story, it showed how a person can self-renew themselves. Sonny self-renewed himself by playing blues music, instead of using heroin. It was a hard long journey, but he portrayed that it can be done. The older brother renewed himself, by making his older brother his main priority and never taking him for granted again. They both realize that they need each other and can do anything if they have each other’s support. Never think something is impossible to overcome. It will be a hard road to overcome one’s problems in life. However, when a person is finally able to renew themselves, everything in life will become easier to overcome.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." Legacies. Casey Rees Bogarad and Jan Zlotnik

Schmidt. 2nd Edition: Harcourt & Brace, 349-373.

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