The Struggle In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

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In the short story, Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin takes place in Harlem during the early 1950’s. The protagonist of the passage is Sonny, and the narrator (whom we don’t find out his name) is his brother.
The main conflict in the story is the narrator’s relationship with his brother, Sonny. The first few pages, the narrator gives suspense to the reader as you’re trying to figure out who Sonny is and what he did as he says, “I was scared. Scared for Sonny. He became real to me again.” “When he was about as old as the boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he’d had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now.” This lets the reader …show more content…

His goal was “…join the army. Or the navy…” The turning point in their relationship is when Sonny admits to his brother “you never hear anything I say” After attending a nightclub together seeing a lady perform, Sonny’s brother has epiphany stating “It struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through – to sing like that.” There relationship grows as Sonny explains why he takes drugs and how heroin effects his music and what the blues means to him. As Sonny opens up, his brother then becomes curious of his pain asking, “Why do people suffer?” Sonny lets his brother know he “needed to clear a space to listen –and I couldn’t find it, and I went crazy, I did terrible things to me, I was terrible for me.” Sonny wanted to change and in order to do so he wanted to leave Harlem. Harlem symbolized drugs for Sonny, he said “The reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs. And then, when I ran away, that’s what I was running from – really. When I came back, nothing had changed, I hadn’t changed, I was jus – older.” Sonnys brothers attitude changes as he finally understands his brother and his suffering and pain. When they went to a show his brother realized “Here, I was in Sonny’s world. Or rather: his kingdom. Here it was not even a question that his veins bore royal

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