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Throughout life we attach our own personal feelings to everyday things. We sometimes attach our feelings to objects the people think have little to no value, but for us it's more than that. Us as humans we are emotional beings, and we tend to find comfort by symbolizing parts of our life to ordinary things. For instance there are people who view splattered paint as just dried splattered paint, while others view it as the tears of their past. “Divine symbols which have been given to mankind from time to time speak to that forum of truth which is within our hearts, and waken our consciousness to divine ideas entirely beyond words” (Max Heindel). In the story “Sonny’s Blues” we are able to analyze that the life of Sunny and the narrator is filled …show more content…
The darkness in Sonny’s life is the possibility of death because of his drug addiction."Tell me," I said at last, "why does he want to die? He must want to die, he's killing himself, why does he want to die?" (Baldwin 295). Drug addiction has the biggest amount of deaths world wide, it starts off with a little try and then leads to lies and unimaginable actions. Like the narrator my sibling does drugs, the darkness in her addiction is the close friendship she has with the possibility of death. The darkness is also transmitted into the narrator's life because he has the fear of losing his only brother. “...In my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin, 292). The narrator’s darkness is from within. Since the beginning of the story the narrator is more concerned with his own life and is very conceited. He always views others in a negative way and he always thinks negatively. For him the darkness is the life he lives and the life others choose to live. The narrator feels that it is pointless to teach high school math to a group of kids who might not get out of Harlem. He also acknowledges that there might be something good about drugs. “All they really knew were two darknesses: the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they …show more content…
It is also a break through for both the narrator and Sonny. In the beginning his brother viewed him as a nobody with no future. Once he finally saw his brother playing music he realized that music was his future. Jazz music was Sonny’s escape from his childhood and his present struggles. Music is where he is able to tell the world how he is feeling without really saying it in words. “And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his” (Baldwin 312). Music helps Sonny free himself from the darkness that he carries. When someone who loves music plays it they feel free to scream to the whole world their dirty secrets without being ashamed because those who dont understand dont look through the fine lines and realize the true meaning of what's being said. Music has a way of expressing a million emotions in just a few words. When Sonny plays his music he makes it his own and as he plays the piano, with each keystroke the pain and the worries leave. He becomes a new man filled with light when he plays the music because the darkness is no longer within him and its when and where he truly feels happy. The narrator watching Sonny play the piano was a breakthrough for him because it's where he realized that he could be happy and free too if he listened to his heart and followed his dreams. “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at
Throughout the story, the narrator learns how important it is to Sonny for him to care and listen to him. Sonny is vulnerable and in a state where he is getting into trouble with drugs and alcohol perhaps because he feels as though no one cares enough to help him. The narrator lives his life as a teacher while Sonny spends his days using drugs hoping someday to pursue his dreams of music. Both characters end up in a place they are meant to be; acting as family and leaning on each other for support, which is the true importance of an older brother.
As "Sonny's Blues" opens, the narrator tells of his discovery that his younger brother has been arrested for selling and using heroin. Both brothers grew up in Harlem, a neighborhood rife with poverty and despair. Though the narrator teaches school in Harlem, he distances himself emotionally from the people who live there and their struggles and is somewhat judgmental and superior. He loves his brother but is distanced from him as well and judgmental of his life and decisions. Though Sonny needs for his brother to understand what he is trying to communicate to him and why he makes the choices he makes, the narrator cannot or will not hear what Sonny is trying to convey. In distancing himself from the pain of upbringing and his surroundings, he has insulated himself from the ability to develop an understanding of his brother's motivations and instead, his disapproval of Sonny's choice to become a musician and his choices regarding the direction of his life in general is apparent. Before her death, his mother spoke with him regarding his responsibilities to Sonny, telling him, "You got to hold on to your brother...and don't let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him and no matter how evil you get with him...you may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you're there" (87) His unwillingness to really hear and understand what his brother is trying to tell him is an example of a character failing to act in good faith.
Richard N. Albert is one critic who explores and analyzes the world of “Sonny’s Blues”. His analysis, “The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”” is an example of how one can discover the plot, characterization and jazz motif that builds this theme of suffering. Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients that make up the plot: the initial situation, conflict, complications, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice. At the beginning of the story, the narrator reads in the newspaper about Sonny’s arrest for using and selling heroin.
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" a pair of brothers try to make sense of the urban decay that surrounds and fills them. This quest to puzzle out the truth of the shadows within their hearts and on the streets takes on a great importance. Baldwin meets his audience at a halfway mark: Sonny has already fallen into drug use, and is now trying to return to a clean life with his brother's aid. The narrator must first attempt to understand and make peace with his brother's drug use before he can extend his help and heart to him. Sonny and his brother both struggle for acceptance. Sonny wants desperately to explain himself while also trying to stay afloat and out of drugs. Baldwin amplifies these struggles with a continuous symbolic motif of light and darkness. Throughout "Sonny's Blues" there is a pervasive sense of darkness which represents the reality of life on the streets of Harlem. The darkness is sometimes good but usually sobering and sometimes fearful, just as reality may be scary. Light is not simply a stereotypical good, rather it is a complex consciousness, an awareness of the dark, and somehow, within that knowledge there lies hope. Baldwin's motif of light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" is about the sometimes painful nature of reality and the power gained from seeing it.
All of humanity suffers at one point or another during the course of their lives. It is in this suffering, this inevitable pain, that one truly experiences life. While suffering unites humankind, it is how we choose to cope with this pain that defines us as individuals. The question becomes do we let suffering consume us, or do we let it define our lives? Through James Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues”, the manner by which one confronts the light and darkness of suffering determines whether one is consumed by it, or embraces it in order to “survive.” Viewing a collection of these motifs, James Baldwin’s unique perspective on suffering as a crucial component of human development becomes apparent. It is through his compassionate portrayal of life’s inescapable hardships that one finds the ability to connect with humankind’s general pool of hardship. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” makes use of the motifs of darkness and light to illuminate the universal human condition of suffering and its coping mechanisms.
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" the symbolic motif of light and darkness illustrates the painful nature of reality the two characters face as well as the power gained through it. The darkness represents the actuality of life on the streets of the community of Harlem, where there is little escape from the reality of drugs and crime. The persistent nature of the streets lures adolescents to use drugs as a means of escaping the darkness of their lives. The main character, Sonny, a struggling jazz musician, finds himself addicted to heroin as a way of unleashing the creativity and artistic ability that lies within him. While using music as a way of creating a sort of structure in his life, Sonny attempts to step into the light, a life without drugs. The contrasting images of light and darkness, which serve as truth and reality, are used to depict the struggle between Sonny and the narrator in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."
The central characters in "Sonny's Blues" afford one another a place in which to suffer. The relationships between these brothers and their mother reveal the ways in which family members allow each other moments of weakness in order to access and resolve personal grief. By allowing one another to suffer, the pain becomes easier to bear. They gain a sense of empathy that helps them to face the life ahead of them. The narrator feels "for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet" (439). It is this feeling of companionship that pushes these characters forward against the trouble.
In James Baldwin’s short story, Sonny’s Blues, he describes a story of pain and prejudice. The theme of suffering makes the readers relate to it. The story is told in the realistic point of view of Sonny’s brother. The setting and time of the story also has great significance to the story. From beginning to end, the story is well developed.
Several passages found throughout "Sonny's Blues" indicate that as a whole, the neighborhood of Harlem is in the turmoil of a battle between good and evil. The narrator describes Sonny's close encounters with the evil manifested in drugs and crime, as well as his assertive attempts at distancing himself from the darker side. The streets and communities of Harlem are described as being a harsh environment which claims the lives of many who have struggled against the constant enticement of emotional escape through drugs, and financial escape through crime. Sonny's parents, just like the others in Harlem, have attempted to distance their children from the dark sides of their community, but inevitably, they are all aware that one day each child will face a decisionb for the first time. Each child will eventually join the ranks of all the other members of society fighting a war against evil at the personal level so cleanly brought to life by James Baldwin. Amongst all the chaos, the reader is introduced to Sonny's special secret weapon against the pressures of life: Jazz. Baldwin presents jazz as being a two-edged sword capable of expressing emotions like no other method, but also a presenting grave danger to each individual who bears it. Throughout the the story, the reader follows Sonny's past and present skirmishes with evil, his triumphs, and his defeats. By using metaphorical factors such as drugs and jazz in a war-symbolizing setting, Baldwin has put the focus of good and evil to work at the heart of "Sonny's Blues."
The story begins with the narrator’s brother, Sonny, being arrested for using heroin. When the narrator discovers what has happened to his brother, he slowly starts to relive his past. Up to this point, the narrator had completely cut his brother and his childhood from his life. He disapproves of the past and does everything in his power to get rid of it. The narrator had become an algebra teacher and had a family who he moved to get away from the bad influences on the street. As a result, it is shown in the story that he has worked hard to maintain a good “clean” life for his family and himself. Readers can see that he has lived a good life, but at the toll of denying where he came from and even his own brother. For years, his constant aim for success had been successful. However, as the story progressed everything he knew started to fall apart.
Though racial and sexual issues seem to continuously serve a main purpose in James Baldwin’s writings, oppression can be described as a useful theme in both “Sonny’s Blues and Going to Meet the Man”( Murphy 6). In “Sonny’s Blues” we meet the narrator, Sonny’s brother who runs into one of Sonny’s old friends who begins conversing with Sonny’s brother about Sonny’s recent arrest. Sonny’s old friend tells the narrator that he “can’t much help Sonny no more” which upsets him because it makes him realize how much he had given up on trying to help his brother. Sonny was suffering from drug abuse, and was in desperate need of a savior. After the
"Sonny's Blues" is filled with examples of music and how it makes things better. The schoolboy, the barmaid, the mother, the brother, the uncle, the street revivalists, all use music to create a moment when life isn't so ugly, even though the world still waits outside and trouble stretches above. Music and the tale it tells provide hope and joy; instead of being the instrument of Sonny's destruction, introducing him to the world of drugs, music is his way out of some of the ugliness. For Sonny and the other characters in this story, music is a bastion against the despair that pervades stunted lives; it is the light that guides them from the darkness without hope.
Harlem is the setting of this story and has been a center for drugs and alcohol abuse. The initial event in this story shows that Sonny is still caught in this world. Sonny says that he is only selling drugs to make money and claims that he is no longer using. In the story the brother begins to see that Sonny has his own problems, but tries to help the people around him by using music to comfort
“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...
The story “Sonny’s Blues” By James Baldwin is about a jazz musician and his brother in 1950’s Harlem. The story centers on Sonny who uses jazz music as an escape from his depression. James Baldwin captures the art of jazz during this time period. The themes in this short story are perhaps varied, but all of them revolve around some form of suffering. One theme shows how music can promote change and understanding within relationships. A second theme reveals suffering caused by guilt. Yet another theme references the results of suffering brought about by searching for ones’ identity and how that leads to misunderstanding. There are also subthemes concerning racism and poverty.