Sonny's Blues Sparknotes

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Sonny's Blues Summary
Sonny’s Blues is a story telling about how the author and his younger brother, Sonny, who had been jailed for drug deal, conflict to each other, communicate with each other and finally understand each other through music. Although it is a short story, however, it includes several interesting and deep themes inside its content. Before starting to summarize the story, it is necessary to introduce the background of the author. In order to better analysis the story, the summarization will be divided into three parts according to the plot.
The first part of the story is generally telling the settings,background and basic events of the story. It starts with the narrator shocked by the news that his younger brother, Sonny, …show more content…

The second part serves to reveal the history of the narrator, Sonny and their parents, especially how those factors interact with Sonny and the narrator thus influence them in the future. Their father died when Sonny was fifteen. Although it seems that his father and Sonny has different personalities: his father seems very loud-talking while Sonny is quite most the time, they have the same privacy. And from the narrator’s mom talking we know that his uncle died of run over by some drunken white men driving a vehicle. This is also the reason why his father pretended to be looking big and tough, but actually was very weak in front of narrator’s mom. His mom also told the narrator to watch over Sonny. It can be inferred here that his mom doesn’t want Sonny to be hurt like his dad did. Thus the narrator gets the responsibility for Sonny and this becomes one factor causes the future plot. After their mom’s funeral the narrator and Sonny talks and tries to figure out what Sonny will do in the future. The answer from Sonny surprised the narrator very much — Sonny plans to become a jazz musician and play the piano, however, the narrator doesn’t understand and thinks it is a bad idea so they have an argument about this. From this point the relationship between Sonny and the narrator gets worse. At last they both make a compromise that Sonny will live with Isabel's parents who have a piano in their house. However, Isabel’s parents figure out that Sonny actually doesn’t go to school, instead, he goes to hang with his music friends. Then Sonny leaves hometown and goes to navy. Thus the relationship between them gets even worse and they don’t write to each other for a long time. The part two generally tells audience the details of the past which kind of clarifies the cause of the conflict between Sonny and the narrator — the latter doesn’t understand Sonny’s dream and

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