Brotherhood and Dreams: A Study of 'Sonny's Blues'

James Baldwin, in his short story “Sonny’s Blues”, depicts a turbulent relationship between two brothers. As the narrator and his brother are haunted by personal trauma and addiction respectively, the reader’s sympathy towards them shifts drastically. Baldwin masterfully exemplifies control of this sympathy through the positive and negative characterization of both the narrator and Sonny.

Sonny is initially characterized as a nuisance with no regard for the future, others, or his own well being, Sonny’s dream is to be a musician, but his caretakers, Isabel’s family, find out that he has been ditching school to spend more time with musicians. The narrator recalls Isabel’s mother’s reaction as “This scared her and she started to scream at him and what came up, once she began...was what sacrifices they were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little he appreciated it” (13). Typically, an unwavering drive to strive for one’s dream is highly respected and appreciated, but this ideal has been perverted by Sonny’s disregard for others. Despite Sonny’s scolding, the reader’s response is more of an agreement that Sonny has gone too far in his endeavors to attempt to become a jazz musician.This, in addition to his drug addiction, characterizes Sonny as a blind dreamer.

Although this may be

People are more than just what they seem to be. Although Sonny seems ungrateful, he is simply a dreamer who will do anything and everything to have his dream come true. Similarly, the narrator is not an inept brother; rather, he just understands how cruel the world can be. This cruelty, evident in Sonny’s drug addiction and the narrator’s loss of his daughter, is another understanding. Everyone has their own hardships; it's how people overcome and live with these hardships that define who a person really