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Subterranean Homesick Blues Again analysis
Subterranean Homesick Blues Again analysis
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The play “ Subterranean Homesick Blues Again” written by Dennis Reardon is an outstanding drama. Written with a concept that everyone pays for the life they live.One way or another,it helps with the expression what goes around comes around. As in the play Kathy is whining about how she is just so cold. That could have been one of the author’s clues to product or shine,some light on the end. I say this because many say when you are dead your body goes cold. Although throw out the play the play write gives you hints here and there for you to come to your own conclusion. It’s a play you have to finish reading to get the full understanding. Now my reaction to the play was that towards the end it started to become creepy.Yet
Sonny’s Blues is first-person narration by the elder brother of the musician struggling with heroin addiction and issues with law. However, on closer inspection it appears that Sonny’s unnamed brother is also very troubled. His difficulties cannot easily be perceived and recognized especially by the character himself. The story gives accounts of the problems Sonny’s brother has with taking responsibility, understanding and respecting his younger brother’s lifestyle.
In James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the unspoken brotherly bond between the narrator and his younger brother Sonny is illustrated through the narrator’s point of view. The two brothers have not spoken in years until the narrator receives a letter from Sonny after his daughter dies. He takes this moment as an important sign from Sonny and feels the need to respond. While both Sonny and the narrator live in separate worlds, all Sonny needs is a brother to care for him while the narrator finds himself in the past eventually learning his role as an older brother.
First, the very sorrow that the characters in this story face is that of racial discrimination a form of darkness. It is noted in the very first paragraph “I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness that roared outside.”(58) The setting of this story takes place in Harlem, New York. The city of Harlem is notoriously known for its inner city, poverty stricken population and mostly as a location in which to find African Americans. “These boys now, were living as we’d been living then they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” (59). The story Sonny’s Blues was written in the 1950’s which clearly segregation was still indeed active and the African Americans were lynched by the darkness of their skin tone. In the 1950’s the chance of an African American becoming successful especially with coming from the ghetto was extremely low. In the time frame that presents itsel...
In "Sonny's Blues" James Baldwin presents an intergenerational portrait of suffering and survival within the sphere of black community and family. The family dynamic in this story strongly impacts how characters respond to their own pain and that of their family members. Examining the central characters, Mama, the older brother, and Sonny, reveals that each assumes or acknowledges another's burden and pain in order to accept his or her own situation within an oppressive society. Through this sharing each character is able to achieve a more profound understanding of his own suffering and attain a sharper, if more precarious, notion of survival.
James Baldwin, author of Sonny’s Blues, was born in Harlem, NY in 1924. During his career as an essayist, he published many novels and short stories. Growing up as an African American, and being “the grandson of a slave” (82) was difficult. On a day to day basis, it was a constant battle with racial discrimination, drugs, and family relationships. One of Baldwin’s literature pieces was Sonny’s Blues in which he describes a specific event that had a great impact on his relationship with his brother, Sonny. Having to deal with the life-style of poverty, his relationship with his brother becomes affected and rivalry develops. Conclusively, brotherly love is the theme of the story. Despite the narrator’s and his brother’s differences, this theme is revealed throughout the characters’ thoughts, feelings, actions, and dialogue. Therefore, the change in the narrator throughout the text is significant in understanding the theme of the story. It is prevalent to withhold the single most important aspect of the narrator’s life: protecting his brother.
In conclusion, “Sonny’s Blues” is the story of Sonny told through his brother’s perspective. It is shown that the narrator tries to block out the past and lead a good “clean” life. However, this shortly changes when Sonny is arrested for the use and possession of heroin. When the narrator starts talking to his brother again, after years of no communication, he disapproves of his brother’s decisions. However, after the death of his daughter, he slowly starts to transform into a dynamic character. Through the narrator’s change from a static to a dynamic character, readers were able to experience a remarkable growth in the narrator.
Then, in the play, Wilson looks at the unpleasant expense and widespread meanings of the violent urban environment in which numerous African Americans existed th...
...and ‘Sonny’s Blues’ are two stories which have similarly addressed the issues of internal and interpersonal conflicts that most people experience in their day to day lives by using the two different narrator’s misconceptions about other characters. Through these narrators involving themselves in their rival’s worlds directly at the end, they come to understand the reality of the situation, rather than continue living under their worlds which have imprisoned them psychologically. Although the two stories have two different plots, the narrators experience relatively similar personal and interpersonal struggles. At the end, the two stories have a similar message in that unless one comes out of their own world and put themselves in other people’s worlds, they will always remain prisoners and would find it hard to understand and relate with those closely related to them.
“Sonny’s Blues” revolves around the narrator as he learns who his drug-hooked, piano-playing baby brother, Sonny, really is. The author, James Baldwin, paints views on racism, misery and art and suffering in this story. His written canvas portrays a dark and continual scene pertaining to each topic. As the story unfolds, similarities in each generation can be observed. The two African American brothers share a life similar to that of their father and his brother. The father’s brother had a thirst for music, and they both travelled the treacherous road of night clubs, drinking and partying before his brother was hit and killed by a car full of white boys. Plagued, the father carried this pain of the loss of his brother and bitterness towards the whites to his grave. “Till the day he died he weren’t sure but that every white man he saw was the man that killed his brother.”(346) Watching the same problems transcend onto the narrator’s baby brother, Sonny, the reader feels his despair when he tries to relate the same scenarios his father had, to his brother. “All that hatred down there”, he said “all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart.”(355) He’s trying to relate to his brother that even though some try to cover their misery with doing what others deem as “right,” others just cover it with a different mask. “But nobody just takes it.” Sonny cried, “That’s what I’m telling you! Everybody tries not to. You’re just hung up on the way some people try—it’s not your way!”(355) The narrator had dealt with his own miseries of knowing his father’s plight, his Brother Sonny’s imprisonment and the loss of his own child. Sonny tried to give an understanding of what music was for him throughout thei...
Brothers tend to grow apart yet eventually find a way to revive an old beat up relationship. These brothers grew up on the rough streets of Harlem and went their separate ways. Sonny was a drug-addicted musician and his older brother was a high school algebra teacher with a family. The way the two brothers reunite through addiction, memories and strife make their bond seem stronger than ever. Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin, is a story about enlightenment through brotherhood when Sonny and his brother go to the club.
However, once the lights change everything goes back to normal. Giving the play a sense of mystery: is Louise actually getting better, or is Nell only imagining her daughter getting better? The mood for the play for myself is between mystery, as the audience wonders if Nell is telling the truth, and melancholy when Billie is trying to see what Nell is telling her about her
At the end of the play things turn out to become very eerie as of the
Family structure is often built on foundations consisting of, trust, principal, and unconditional love. Relatives are often a reflection of the morals, and dignity our guardians instilled in us. The struggle in families arises when an individual does not live up to the standards set for them, by family, and sometimes results in incarceration, or use of narcotics. In “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, readers encounter two brothers who are brought up in the rough neighborhood of Harlem, New York. Although Sonny, the younger brother, chooses a different life path in heroin usage, and in being a musician, his older brother, the narrator, becomes an algebra teacher. Despite not being in each other’s lives for a period of time, the knitted fraternal relationship that they share proves to be eternal regardless of their loss of contact. Ultimately, this story is an amazing illustration of how two people are from the same blood and home, are never quite the same, yet the love of a family will always be kindled. In the following articles "Sonny's Blues": A Message in Music, by Suzy Bernstein Goldman, explains how people often explain their emotions through music. In another article titled, -“ Black Literature Revisited: "’Sonny's Blues’" by Elaine R. Ognibene, she elaborates on the effects music has to bring two people together. Finally, in “The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin's "’Sonny's Blues’" by Richard N Albert discusses, the bound in families and enlightens on the cliché saying that blood is thicker than water. Ultimately, Albert provides the best interpretation of the short story “Sonny Blues,” because it’s more realistic and relatable from my own personal experience.
“The Weary Blues” is a poem written in 1925 was an observation of the author watching a black man play on the piano. “He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues,” (Hughes, The Weary Blues.) His music was described as depressing and full of emotion. “He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues,” (Hughes.) The listener to the tune hears the pianist sing of how there is no one else that understands or listens to his problems and he later on in the melody wishes that he was dead. The setting of the parlor in which he plays at accompanies the reader in forming an opinion of the man’s emotions. The parlor is described as gloomy and old. The melancholy tune and how the blues player lives his nights shows how lonely he feels. This story expresses both problems with common american alienation and black migration into highly populated white areas. African American loneliness was a common feeling during the modernist time period. Blacks were treated differently in public amongst peers which resulted in the feeling of being different from everyone. Literature evolved through the opportunity of making it known of this issue. The loneliness of African American families motivated black writers to create literature that would alter the mindset of society. This work of literature emphasized the Harlem Renaissance. With African Americans improving so greatly in literature, music, and dance, the difference the blacks felt against white culture was easier to be
The play Family 2.0 by Walter Wykes is about a man who tries to just change all of his life in the matter of moments. He thinks that just by walking into a new house and claiming the man who actually lives theirs life his life will be better. The man called Husband even convinces the First Husband's wife that this is a good idea and she even agrees to replace her first husband with him and even gets the kids on board. All of them thinking that this change will make their lives better than the lives they had before.