The Inevitability of Suffering in James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues
Everyone likes to feel safe. We try to protect ourselves and those we love, to make them feel safe as well. The idea conveyed about safety in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is that there is no such thing.
The narrator of this story had thought that his brother Sonny was safe. Or at least, that was what he had made himself believe. "I told myself that Sonny was wild, but he wasn't crazy. And he'd always been a good boy, he hadn't ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem. I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in the condition I'd already seen so many others" (48). But Sonny hadn't been safe from drugs, or the streets, or any of the things his brother had been sure he was immune to. He had been arrested for using and peddling heroin. Sonny's friend, the boy we meet later, had thought the same thing as Sonny's brother had. " 'I thought Sonny was a smart boy...too smart to get hung'" (49). But they were both wrong.
It had been Sonny's brother's responsibility to look out for Sonny from the time Sonny was born. "When he started to walk, he walked from our mother straight to me. I caught him just before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world" (52). The narrator of the story is Sonny's big brother, so he feels responsible for him. This responsibility is confirmed by their mother on page 55, and the older brother reassures her, "I won't let nothing happen to Sonny" (57). But he fails at this, Sonny leaves and gets into trouble. Perhaps the narrator felt that if he couldn't keep his brother safe,...
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...fe. But he couldn't.
And indeed, suffering, lack of safety, is unavoidable, and also necessary for some things. "When I was downstairs before, on my way here, listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much" (65). But we do. Everyone does. In fact, "There's no way not to suffer" (65). We are never safe from it.
Total safety is not attainable. Not only in Harlem, but everywhere, there are things that are simply not under our control. Try as we might to block out unpleasant things for those around us, we cannot. This is the feeling that Baldwin creates through the story of Sonny and his brother.
List of Work Cited
Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Norton introduction to Fiction. 6th ed. Ed. Jerome Beaty. New York: Norton, 1996. 47-70.
According to his brother, who narrates "Sonny's Blues," Sonny was a bright-eyed young man full of gentleness and privacy. "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, a great gentleness and privacy. I wondered what he looked like now" (Baldwin 272). Something happened to Sonny, as it did to most of the young people growing up in Harlem. His physical journey growing up in the streets caused a great deal of inner turmoil about whom he was and what kind of life he was to have. One thing for sure, by the time his mother died, Sonny was ready to get out of Harlem. " 'I ain't learning nothing in school,' he said. 'Even when I go.' He turned away from me and opened the window and threw his cigarette out into the narrow alley. I watched his back. 'At least, I ain't learning nothing you'd want me to learn.' He slammed the window so hard I thought the glass would fly out, and turned back to me. 'And I'm sick of the stink of these garbage cans!' " (Baldwin 285).
In the story Sonny's Blues the author, James Baldwin, uses the image of darkness quite frequently. He uses it first when the older brother (main character) talks about his younger brother Sonny. He says that when Sonny was younger his face was bright and open. He said that he didn't want to believe that he would ever see his "brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out." Meaning he had gone from good (clean and innocent) to bad ( giving into drugs like so many of the other young people).
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.
“Teenage Abortion and Pregnancy Statistics by State,1992.” Guttmacher Institute. N.p., 1996-2010. Web. 18 Mar. 2010. .
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."
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” The Jazz Fiction Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 17-48.
“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...
In a 2006 study conducted by the CDC, it was reported that 53-56% of abortions were performed on white women between the ages of 20 and 29. Among the 46 states that provided data consistently during 1996--2006, a total of 835,134 abortions (98.7% of the total) were reported; the abortion rate was 16.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15--44 years, and the abortion ratio was 236 abortions per 1,000 live births. During the previous decade (1997--2006), reported abortion numbers, rates, and ratios decreased 5.7%, 8.8%, and 14.8%, respectively; most of these declines occurred before 2001. During the previous year (2005--2006), the total number of abortions increased 3.1%, and the abortion rate increased 3.2%; the abortion ratio was stable. (CDC, 2009)
The short story Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin is written in first person through the narrator. This story focuses on the narrator’s brother sonny and their relationship throughout the years. This story is taken place in Harlem, New York in the 1950s. The narrator is a high school algebra teacher and just discovered his brother in the newspaper. This story includes the traditional elements to every story, which consist of the exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and the resolution.
In James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the unspoken brotherly bond between the narrator and his younger brother Sonny is illustrated through the narrator’s point of view. The two brothers have not spoken in years until the narrator receives a letter from Sonny after his daughter dies. He takes this moment as an important sign from Sonny and feels the need to respond. While both Sonny and the narrator live in separate worlds, all Sonny needs is a brother to care for him while the narrator finds himself in the past eventually learning his role as an older brother.
From the first lines of the story the reader gets the impression that Sonny’s brother tries to block out, ignore the truth about his brother and his troubles. The reaction the character has to the newspaper article about Sonny was: “It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that” (Baldwin 292). At this stage his relations with the younger brother remind of the way a teacher walks across the playground full of potentially troubled kids “though he or she couldn’t wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those boys out of their sight and off their minds” (Baldwin 293). Having some suspicions concerning Sonny’s ...
According to A Novel Approach to Politics “Questions about the very nature of reality seem to be common in fiction of all sorts.” Especially, The Boondocks, a fictional cartoon, uses satire to describe real events that happen in society. The episode I tuned into was “The Trial of R. Kelly”, which explained how R. Kelly won his trial and the views of the people about his case. In the episode, the people outside the court house showed different cognitive frameworks of how they view R. Kelly situation. In other words, the media made sense of the reality of R. Kelly situation in different ways because of the media wanted to select certain information. In this paper, I will explain how the media exemplified mediated reality and agreement reality in the “The Trial of R. Kelly” episode of The Boondocks.
"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.
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.
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.