Exploring Darkness in 'Sonny’s Blues'

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“Sonny’s Blues” contains a lot of darkness throughout the story. Sonny’s Blues uses Sonny’s pain, fear, desolation and losses of loved ones and Harlem’s negativity to show the representation of darkness. This darkness begins when the narrator reads the article about his brother Sonny. The narrator starts to have much darkness imagery. On the subway the narrator feels “Trapped in darkness which roared outside” Page93 (Norton Introduction to Literature, Sonny’s Blues). The narrator disbelieves that this is actually happening to his brother. His trapped in negative thoughts on Sonny’s drug abuse that he starts to feel scared for sonny. The narrator feels that he has failed at taking care of his brother. The narrator compares Sonny’s darkness with his student’s darkness. Stated in the following quote “ These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against …show more content…

“The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they know. The child knows what they won’t talk anymore because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.” page100. (Norton Introduction to Literature, Sonny’s Blues). This quote shows the cruelty and suffering the community had to go through. In “Sonny’s Blues” the mom goes on telling a story about the narrator and Sonny’s uncle who had been out with his brother (Sonny’s dad) one late night who was drunk and decided to run down a hill with his guitar and was killed by drunken men in a car. She says “This car was full of white men” Page101(Norton Introduction to Literature, Sonny’s Blues).The mother says this to warn the narrator that Sonny might fall through the same steps like his uncle not only that but she was showing her concern and worries that racism is still a big threat to her

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