Symbolism In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

In the context of Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” story, the life among his family and others reflected many events. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” resembled the life of his brother who wanted to make a career established in music before completing high school. As the story went on, there were emotions and bonding among each other and lastly forming some sort of peace. By peace meaning they both established ground rules of what their life would be after going through the trouble. Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” settled a principle of integrity of respect and experienced symbolism as a factor of understanding situations. I think that the narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” remains unnamed because the story varied a lot from the beginning to the end. In other words,

In Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, I feel that the narrator’s deceased child’s name Grace symbolized a meaning of why “Sonny’s Blues” was written. For example, “I read about Sonny’s trouble in the spring. Little Grace died in the fall. She was a beautiful little girl. But she only lived a little over two years. She died of polio and she suffered. And when she did scream, it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she’d ever heard in all her life, and she still hears it sometimes in her dreams. Isabel will sometimes wake me up with a low, moaning, strangling sound and I have to be quick to awaken her and hold her to me and where Isabel is weeping against me seems a mortal wound. I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real.” (The Literary Experience 401) In this passage, Little Grace had represented a way of Sonny’s brother to write to Sonny that how he is doing. In other words, Grace’s death had made Sonny’s brother realize or give a high concern of Sonny’s situation at the current