Sonny's Blues: A Beat Is Worth a Thousand Words

In any medium the last words of an author, lyricist or screenwriter are the most powerful of the entire piece. An ending can completely ruin a perfectly good piece if it isn't what it should be. It can also redeem a mostly mediocre piece by being exactly what it should be. Often the best endings are ones that do not end the way the reader wants them to, but end the way the reader knows they should. Baldwin is definitely an author who knows how to end a story.

The last four paragraphs of `Sonny's Blues' are written in what some people like to call `pencil' form. This means that they are almost interchangeable, they are written in a form where one paragraph could be before another and each could end the story. The order of them does not seem to matter so much as the meaning does. Which in itself shows how much is really packed into each paragraph. The end of this short story is told in a very common narrative form that tells exactly what happened detail by detail. Through the use of "then" as the first word in each paragraph, the narrator expresses to the audience what is happening exactly as it happens to him, piece by piece and feeling by feeling. This gives you a little insight into his psyche in a much more personal way than what an author usually attempts to convey with the word "I," and truly instills a bond between the reader and the narrator. You could almost say it makes you trust him and believe the rest of the story is true. Baldwin's utilization of personified description as well as the flow of his words make the piece read as if it actually was a jazz song by describing the feeling any person who has heard jazz knows. He leaves enough ambiguousness to really make you feel the music through the words, yet gives as mu...

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... from emotion, meaning that Sonny himself evokes the emotion of what each song means in their relationship and by seeing it the narrator does as well.

The word choice throughout the last four paragraphs must have been very deliberate. The decision for the story to be a short story must have been a very conscious one that Baldwin made. He uses only what is necessary and combines musical terms and common speech to pack the myriad of emotions evoked into as few words as possible. The narrator never really verbalizes the actual feelings that he or his brother feels but rather lets the readers see them and feel them for themselves through the images he portrays and the history attached. Much as music infers emotion through the gut rather than the ear and gives you shivers without saying a word at all Baldwin's descriptions convey maximum emotion with minimal language.