Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Racism in literature
James baldwin personal essays
How is racism portrayed in literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
“Sonny’s Blues” James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a short story about the entangled lives of two African American brothers from Harlem. The narrator is a military veteran and high school algebra teacher. His brother, Sonny, seven years his junior, is a lost soul with a heroin addiction and a talent for playing the piano. Although the narrator appears to be successful, the story eludes constantly to the darkness, gloom, and despair of growing up in Harlem. The brothers go through periods of estrangement and in the end, they develop a new respect for each other. James Baldwin’s choice of the word blues in the title appears to be related to the state of mind of the characters, rather than the music Sonny played. In the opening paragraphs, the narrator refers to his students as being like Sonny, full of rage and darkness. His clothes are full of perspiration and he hold his breath until the students leave the room at the end of day. He sees Sonny in them and it frightens him. He hears their cursing and wicked laugh and knows any or all of them are shooting up and can end up like Sonny. This is where life in Harlem leads them. …show more content…
A car over runs their father’s brother full of drunken Caucasian men and he never speaks of it. Their mother tells them after their father dies and states the he was never the same. When his mother dies, the narrator promises her he will look after the troubled Sonny. The story opens with Sonny’s release from jail for a heroin raid. The brothers have not spoken for a year. The narrator wants nothing to do with him. The death of the narrator’s toddler girl unexpectedly from polio prompts a change of heart and he writes Sonny. The letter is the most emotion the narrator exhibits. He and Sonny reunite but life is not
" Sonny had been wild, but not crazy, he had always been a good boy and had never turned hard or evil or disrespectful the way the kids did and still do in Harlem."…His face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it; and he had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and a great gentleness and privacy…." (66).
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.
In this essay James Baldwin’s world renowned story “Sonny’s Blues” will be analysed in detail, including Baldwin’s background, the artistic quality, thematic meanings, a plot summary, and the role this story plays in world literature. James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in New York’s Harlem. At the time the center of black culture, Harlem was once a culturally vibrant community of artists of all kinds, but it was also a neighborhood deeply afflicted by poverty and violence. Baldwin’s mother was eventually left by Baldwin’s biological father, and assumed a job as a domestic servant and married the preacher David Baldwin, whose strong influence on Baldwin was evident not only in Baldwin’s writing but in his religious faith as well. Baldwin’s religious faith had its follies.
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
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.
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.
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 story Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin is a story about people’s actions and the effect that they have on the environment and the people around them. The Narrator is the older brother and the keeper of Sonny after his mother passes away. It is his duty to watch over his younger brother and to help guide him through life and to make the correct decisions. This caused great distress for him because he was never able to control Sonny and the life that he chooses to live. Sonny is The Narrators brother and is a dynamic character who decides early on what he wants to do with his life. This creates a constant tug of war with his brother which ends with him denouncing his brother and they also ceased talking for a long time. Sonny is also addicted
This as Sherard states, provided as a temporary agent to them and allowed them to “ignore the struggles within [their] community” (Sherard 692). Once sucked into their addictions to escape Harlem, most soon lost sight of their African-American cultural norms. Shepard further analyzes this by pointing out a particular scene in Baldwin’s story in which the narrator encounters that of the standard Harlem residence, which he describes to be “always high and raggy” and “Sonny’s friend” (Baldwin 77). The scene reveals Sonny’s friend to be “the ghetto dynamic [the narrator] worked so hard to rise above” (Sherard 694), once being reminded of the typical person who resided in Harlem, the narrator immediately disliked him. As Shepard analyzed, this particular scene limelights “that what is at stake is Sonny’s adherence to or transcendence of the Harlem-as-dead-end plot the boy is intrinsically aware of but which the narrator has difficulty formulating because of his own apparent escape from it” (Sherard 695) which is his urgentness to assimilate to white culture. Shepard makes clear that African Americans in Harlem’s need to escape their culture, whether it be by assimilating or doing drugs, prohibits them from actualizing the necessity and becoming self-aware “of the context of their own cultural forms” and the
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
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.
... the miserable life that African Americans had to withstand at the time. From the narrator’s life in Harlem that he loathed, to the drug problems and apprehensions that Sonny was suffering from, to the death of his own daughter Grace, each of these instances serve to show the wretchedness that the narrator and his family had to undergo. The story in relation to Baldwin possibly leads to the conclusion that he was trying to relate this to his own life. At the time before he moved away, he had tried to make a success of his writing career but to no avail. However, the reader can only be left with many more questions as to how Sonny and the narrator were able to overcome these miseries and whether they concluded in the same manner in the life of Baldwin.
In conclusion, the short story "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin brings out two main themes: irony and suffering. You can actually feel the pain that Baldwin's characters experience; and distinguish the two different lifestyles of siblings brought up in the same environment. The older brother remaining nameless is a fabulous touch that really made me want to read on. This really piqued my interest and I feel it can lead to many discussions on why this technique was used. I really enjoyed this story; it was a fast and enjoyable reading. Baldwin keeps his readers thinking and talking long after they have finished reading his stories. His writing technique is an art, which very few, if any, can duplicate.
The narrator allows Sonny to move into his apartment. By allowing Sonny to live with him he has allowed to trust him again. For example, the narrator explains, “The idea of searching Sonny’s room made me still. I scarcely dared to admit to myself what I’d be searching for. I didn’t know what I’d do if I found it. Or if I didn’t” (pg. 91). This shows how the narrator had the opportunity to search his brother’s room, but had the ability not to. Tension grew among brothers while living under one roof. This starts the climax of both arguing in the apartment. The narrator doesn’t understand why his brother wants to be a musician. This argument was built of emotion both had and not yet discussed among each other. Such as the narrator expressing his anger towards his brother’s drug use and Sonny’s frustration towards the narrator not understanding his plan to become a jazz musician. For example, the narrator states, “I realized, with this mocking look, that there stood between us, forever, beyond the power of time or forgiveness, the fact that I had held silence – so long! – when he had needed human speech to help him” (pg.94). The argument with his brother made him realize that he abandon his younger brother when he needed him the most. He realized that if he would have spoken out and talk about his drug use that he wouldn’t have to go
People often struggle to understand or fail to understand their setting of the surroundings and the relationships they are in. They can either accept the lightness or fight through the darkness. The darkness that is being shown in “Sonny's Blues” by James Baldwin is the reality of life, choosing to do good or bad by the choices you make. In the streets of Harlem as a community, there were youth that were struggling to make their way out of there. The struggles were affected by the drugs and crimes surrounding the community. It was nature to the streets of Harlem because they were so used to it, which is why escaping from the darkness in their lives was hard because the drugs were a part of their culture. Sonny a jazz musician who's struggling for his music to be found, finds himself