Sonny's Blues Literary Analysis Essay

James Baldwin’s, “Sonny’s Blues” is a short story from an older brother’s point of view of his brother’s life. Throughout this story there are a lot of detailed settings. This story is based in New York, and most of the setting is in Harlem. I enjoyed the detailed places, it gave me a more in depth visual and understanding. The narrator gave the readers more than just physical settings. There a few distinctive settings that I find important in this story. Although the older brother (narrator) wants the best for his little brother, the streets of Harlem get to him first.

In the beginning of the story the narrator is on the train heading to work. He describes how he’ reading the newspaper and how a particular headline/ article has caught his

eye. His little brother Sonny has been locked up for drugs. He didn’t want to believe the news as he walked up the block to his job. While at work it was hard for him to keep his focus on his students because they reminded him of Sonny when he was their age. He spoke about how hard it was, “I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room or it anywhere inside one” (Baldwin, 2013, p.23). He wondered while watching the young boys, where did Sonny go wrong, and will these young men turn out the same way, he’s in denial.
Settings are mainly described as actual places or physical space. Secondly, in this story he talked about mental spaces he was taken to. He ran into an old friend of Sonny when he got off of work. This was not a reunion that will help all of the anxiety he was facing earlier that day. The guy automatically started talking about the newspaper article, and walks with him to the train station. Before leaving each other, the friend mentions to him that he may be the reason Sonny started doing drugs in the first place. “All this was carrying me some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the music, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin, 2013, p.23). That put him in the same mood he was in when he first got to work. After seeing the friend, he said he would reach out to Sonny, but he never did until a while later.
After the passing of his little girl, he reached out to his brother, Sonny wrote him back and described another “not so physical” space, but an emotional/mental space. “But now I feel like a man who’s been trying to jump up out of some deep, real deep, and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside” (Baldwin, 2013, p.23). Although it sounds like an actual space, he’s referring to how deep of hole he’s dug into from the bad choices he’s made and how he’s trying to fix them but it’s extremely hard and he just wants it to get better. He doesn’t give a detailed version on how his experience is, and why he’s there to begin with, he’s not talkative. After the letter, they kept in touch and he returned to New York. They reunited, and because he was gone for so long he requested to pass by a park that was significant to their childhood. The narrator described the ride pass the park, the scenery of it, and how the neighborhood itself didn’t really change. As they get closer to his home, he explains the positives of why he chose to stay in the same neighborhood, but also felt that he was bringing his brother back to what had him away to begin with.
Next, he has two memories that gave him a look back at how and why his brother may have turned out the way he did.

First, he thinks about the last time he saw his mother alive. He describes how she would always be on Sunday afternoons, and how live his house would be. It would be full of church folks and relatives after a big Sunday dinner. “And my mother rocks a little from the waist, and my father’s eyes are closed. Everyone is looking at something a child can’t see. For a minute they’ve forgotten the children. Maybe a kid is lying on the rug, half asleep. Maybe somebody’s got a kid in his lap and is absent-mindedly stroking the kid’s head. Maybe there’s a kid, quiet and big-eyed, curled up in a big chair in the corner” (Baldwin, 2013, p.23). His last conversation with his mom had to do with his little brother. She wanted to make sure that no matter what he would always look out for him. Being hopeful and confident, he let her know on three different occasions that Sonny was good. His mom passed away and he and Sonny share a conversation in the now empty kitchen. Here is where Sonny lets him know that he want to be a musician, preferably a jazz pianist. The brother didn’t take him serious, and Sonny was sent to live with his wife Isabella and her

parents.
While living with them, he played the piano every day, all day unless he was at school, eating, or sleeping. Isabella and her family looked out for Sonny in many ways, they made sure he ate, washed and let him go and come as he pleased. When they found out that he was skipping school to hang out, some things came out of the moms mouth that were hard to come back from. She yelled about how her and her family sacrificed a lot to have him live with them, and how he was unappreciative. He had to hear from two more people, and after a few days of silence, Sonny was gone. He joined the Navy and went to Greece to get as far as possible away from Harlem.
Now out and staying with his older brother, Sonny is trying to find himself again and how to settle into being free.

He stepped out one Saturday afternoon, and while he was gone his brother couldn’t help but feel like he wanted to snoop around his room, but he didn’t. Instead he watched the people across the street from his living room window. He described the people that was having an old-fashioned revival on Seventh Avenue. While watching them he spots Sonny watching as well, and he notices how interested he is. When he returns upstairs, they talk about the scene downstairs and Sonny opens up about his drug addiction and the things he’s endured in his life. ““When she was singing before,” said Sonny, abruptly, “her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And—and sure.” He sipped his beer, very deliberately not looking at me. I watched his face. “It makes you feel—in control. Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling.”” (Baldwin, 2013,

p.23).
Sonny asks his brother to come watch him play at a bar later on that night. Trying to make things better between them, he decides to join him. Later on that night they head to a nightclub downtown. The bar was said to be narrow but jam-packed, dark, and noisy. Sonny introduces his brother to his friends/ bandmates, he then realized how popular his brother was. In this setting, Sonny is his zone and he’s about to tear the stage up! It’s been a year since he’s touched the piano, and in the beginning that was very obvious. But when Sonny got back into his groove, he had everyone enjoying and praising him again. There a few distinctive settings that I find important in this story, but this moment in the bar while Sonny is getting back to himself and what he always wanted is the most important.