To listen is to make an effort to hear something: to be alert and ready to act upon. By listening we learn new ideas and express care for one another. Sonny’s Blues, written by James Baldwin, is a short story presented by the Narrator, that explains the survival of two brothers, trying to get through the horrors of Harlem. The narrator’s brother, Sonny, has been arrested for distributing and using heroin. The narrator, in denial about the suffering he has become accustomed to in Harlem, can deny it no more after the literal and metaphoric death of his daughter, grace, and only finds salvation after listening to and comprehending his brother Sonny’s music. Through listening, the narrator can finally recover grace once again. The beginning …show more content…
The narrator took this as to be the father of sonny and care for him in that perspective. She states “If anything happens to me he ain’t going to have nobody to look out for him”. When she eventually dies, the narrator cannot keep his promise and Sonny is left on his own. Finally, when Grace dies, the narrator goes to Sonny for help. A connection is made when, after Sonny is left out of jail and they can finally comprehend each other, and sort out each other’s problems. The narrator has been suffering for as long as he’s been in Harlem and after Grace’s death. The difference is that he’s been in denial about his suffering the entire time. Baldwin writes: “He didn’t answer me and he wouldn’t look at me. “Sonny, you hear me?”. He pulled away. “I hear you”. “But you never hear anything I …show more content…
He denies that he is suffering because he believes he has no reason to listen to anyone else. That because he has the “american dream” that he has achieved all there is to life, when in reality he is suffering because of this. Through many failed attempts, Sonny tries to persuade the narrator that if he could just listen, he can avoid his suffering and not be alone. To be together could eventually lead to the full achievement of grace. Once Grace dies, he finally accepts that he is suffering and can open up to Sonny and listen. This is a pivot point in the narrator’s perspective and can finally be free of suffering. In Sonny’s point of view, it’s the violence and drugs that creates his horrors. “And he’s always been a good kid but, he hadn’t ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick especially in
Sonny has had to deal with many troubles in life, and he turns to drugs for release, but this is just another one of his problems. Sonny is not very old when his
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 James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues", the verb, to listen, is employed many times in varying contexts. This theme is developed throughout the story as the narrator learns to listen more closely to the aural stimuli (or sounds) which enter his ears. In order to understand the narrator's heightened degree of perception as it unfolds in "Sonny's Blues", it is necessary to begin with a thorough discussion of hearing and listening in general, and then as they relate to the story.
Grace, who was the narrator’s daughter died from a battle with polio. After Grace’s death, the narrator begins to realize how much darkness there was in Sonny’s life, Therefore, he realized that he lost his own grace for not helping Sonny deal with his problems and breaking a promise he made with his mother before her death. This would bring up another biblical reference which was from the story of “The Fall”. Baldwin constantly uses this source throughout Sonny’s Blues as he uses the verb “to fall” lots of times. The Narrator would have flashbacks of Sonny when he was learning how to walk. When Sonny walked to the narrator, the narrator caught him “before he fell when he took the first steps he ever took in this world” (Baldwin, 128). These flashbacks would serve as a reminder to the narrator of a brother’s role to protect his brother from falling, which were a duty and a promise made by his mother that the narrator failed to keep. This would bring us back to Grace where the term, “fall” is used again to describe Grace’s death. Grace’s fall would haunt the narrator as it serves as a reminder of “Sonny’s fall and his own fall from Grace for ignoring the promise that he made to his mother not to let Sonny fall” (Tackach,
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.
Sonny’s Blues written by James Baldwin appears to suggest that family and faith are important aspects in someone’s life and that each person has a different way of dealing with their own demons. The author writes with an expressive purpose and narrative pattern to convey his message and by analyzing the main characters, the point of view of the narration, the conflict in the story and the literary devices Baldwin utilizes throughout his tale, his central idea can be better understood.
Struggle, drugs, separation and reunion, that is what James Baldwin illustrates in Sonny’s blues. It is the story between two entirely different brothers as they struggle to discover who each one of them really is. “Sonny’s Blues” is narrated through the nameless older brother through first person with limited omniscience. Point of view is the narrator’s position in relation to the story which is depicted by the attitude toward the characters and Baldwin purposely picks to tell the story in the first person point of view because of the omniscient and realistic effects it contribute to the story overall. The point of view in this
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."
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.
After discovering what has happened to Sonny, the narrator makes it seem as if he does not care and does not want interference in the life he has worked so hard to create. This is proven when the narrator discusses what has happened to Sonny with one of his brother’s friends. As shown through this quote, the narrator is not concerned about what has happened to his brother and believes it is not his responsibili...
"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.
“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...
I feel having Sonny's brother narrate the story in the first person is Baldwin's way of telling us that Sonny's brother is also suffering but inside, unlike Sonny who takes drugs and sings the blues. Sonny's ...
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.