Sonny's Blues Sparknotes

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African-Americans have endured difficulties that affected them in ways some cannot fathom. It was not until the outbreak of the Negro movement, or more commonly knowns as the Harlem Renaissance, that Jazz was born. Music became a unifier for the African-Americans living in injustice. Tracy Shepard offers a critique on James Baldwin’s short story named “Sonny’s Blues”. Sonny’s Blues was an insightful and enlightening outlook of African-Americans during the period of the Harlem Renaissance. As Sherard states clearly in her analysis, “Sonny’s Bebop: Baldwin’s “Blues Text” as Intracultural Critique”, she is able to conjure the significance of Blues and Bebop and correlate its importance to the African-Americans and “the historical contexts of …show more content…

This as Sherard states, provided as a temporary agent to them and allowed them to “ignore the struggles within [their] community” (Sherard 692). Once sucked into their addictions to escape Harlem, most soon lost sight of their African-American cultural norms. Shepard further analyzes this by pointing out a particular scene in Baldwin’s story in which the narrator encounters that of the standard Harlem residence, which he describes to be “always high and raggy” and “Sonny’s friend” (Baldwin 77). The scene reveals Sonny’s friend to be “the ghetto dynamic [the narrator] worked so hard to rise above” (Sherard 694), once being reminded of the typical person who resided in Harlem, the narrator immediately disliked him. As Shepard analyzed, this particular scene limelights “that what is at stake is Sonny’s adherence to or transcendence of the Harlem-as-dead-end plot the boy is intrinsically aware of but which the narrator has difficulty formulating because of his own apparent escape from it” (Sherard 695) which is his urgentness to assimilate to white culture. Shepard makes clear that African Americans in Harlem’s need to escape their culture, whether it be by assimilating or doing drugs, prohibits them from actualizing the necessity and becoming self-aware “of the context of their own cultural forms” and the

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