What Is The Importance Of Sonny's Role In Rich Brother By Tobias Wolff

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When you are the oldest sibling you automatically are assigned with a semi parental role. One now has to help our parents with our younger brothers or sisters by assisting in taking care of them. When you become the oldest sibling, your duties expand. As the only child before one only had to clean after ourselves but now you somehow feel responsible for assisting the younger sibling, sometimes it comes naturally to help out but other times it just doesn’t. It is much harder however when you have to take the actual parental role. This happens in most cases when both of your parents die and your younger siblings are too young to take care of themselves. And in other cases, your sibling can be the oldest one on earth and you sometimes still have to take care of them financially or in every aspect like if they were your own child. For example, “Donald” from the short story “Rich Brother” by author “Tobias Wolff”. “In this story, I see two flat characters that constantly deal with …show more content…

“It could come again, he said, almost as though speaking to himself” (Baldwin) (291). On a journal article written by “Robert R, McParland” he states “that is Sonny appears to be always coming apart or coming back together again” (2). The narrator however wants to rescue Sonny from this but perhaps only music can be Sonny’s salvation. I do think music can be Sonny’s salvation because Sonny has always wanted to become a musician. Although the narrator lost contact with Sonny I do know he wants to keep him out of trouble by supporting him and trying to understand his feelings. I see both characters growing together. It seems like Sonny truly wants to change his lifestyle since he has been trying to escape drugs since the beginning as he says “I couldn’t tell you when Mama died—but the reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs” (291) sadly he felt for drugs

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