Salvation In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

In Sonny’s Blues a big issue is the idea of Salvation. Sonny’s blues is a story about two brothers on opposite paths, with different worldviews. The characters in the story are from the same place, raised by the same people, and taught the same things, but they are different in the brain and heart, which makes their journey to salvation very different trips. Sonny is the younger of the brothers and he struggles with drugs, the ideas of suffering, and feeling trapped. The narrator on the other hand struggles with the death of his daughter, his relationship with his brother, and feeling trapped. James Baldwin wrote this short story during the 1950’s and it is still very relevant today, people are still looking for salvation and still trying to

The story starts when the narrator reads about his brother’s incarceration for getting caught with Heroin. The brothers hadn’t spoken in years and that didn’t change until narrator’s daughter dies. After the death of his daughter the narrator and Sonny write letters and when Sonny gets out of prison, he comes to live with his older brother, the narrator and the narrator’s wife, Isabel. The narrator lives in Harlem, where the men grew up and where both men did their best to escape from. On their way back to the narrator’s apartment the men looked out the window, seeing boys who remind them of their younger selves and the feelings of being young in Harlem. The neighborhood brings back memories about their childhood making both men think about the ways in which they are trapped forever in

Sonny looks for salvation from a variety of things in multitude of different places. Harlem is where Sonny started looking for salvation from, and he found it in doing Heroin and playing the blues. Sonny left Harlem before he even graduated high school, but he never truly left Harlem. Harlem latched on to Sonny in the form of a Heroin addiction. The narrator often blamed Sonny’s musical friends or his career choice as the reason for Sonny’s drug problem. In truth though it was a way for Sonny to deal with the suffering he saw in the world and he felt himself. Sonny felt good when he was playing music or shooting up so he thought those were salvation. When Sonny played his blues it gave him an outlet for the sadness that his soul held, and when he did heroin he was able to forget about it. For Sonny the two had very little to do with each other that can be seen in the scene when the brothers talk about his addiction and his career path, Sonny says, “ ‘It’s not so much to play. It’s to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level.’ He frowned and smiled: ‘In order to keep from shaking to pieces.” Sonny latter goes on to talk about how he felt the need to hide from the suffering people must go through because its just not right that people should suffer so much. To Sonny music and heroin were two different escapes but to the narrator they were one in the same,