Comparing Sonny's Blues And Everyday Use

In the short story, “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, we meet a young musician named Sonny. The principal individual storyteller of "Sonny's Blues" recounts the tale of his association with his more youthful sibling, Sonny. The story starts when the storyteller peruses about Sonny getting got in a medication bust. Disheartened by his sibling's decisions, the storyteller recalls on their adolescence, pondering what made his sibling turn into a find.

Sonny’s Blues digs deeply into the “Negro American” during Civil Rights and Jim Crow Era’s. Set in Harlem, New York in the 1950’s. James Baldwin’s stories give insight based on events of his culture and this becomes apparent through the analysis of the characters in Sonny’s Blues. James Baldwin uses his talents to paint a vivid picture of African American life through a fictional story of two brothers who chose very different path’s in life in order to achieve the pinnacle of self-expression and acceptance.

Sonny’s Blues is one of the most revered of James Baldwin’s stories; wildly debated for its variance of topics the short story embodies. Racial discrimination, expression of music (Jazz), Harlem’s quandary and Light and Dark imagery are some of the various topics he conveys in this story. Light and Dark motifs contrast with truth and false truth throughout the story, James Baldwin uses this to denote the narrator’s feelings about many situations he faced in life, light also undertones a moral and law-abiding living. It epitomizes a way to survive and a means to save Sonny’s positivity and possible future to anticipate.

In the story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin the narrator of the story is Sonny’s older brother. Throughout the story Sonny’s brother discovers that music is his brother’s way of coping with what life has handed him. In the story Sonny’s older brother feels charged with the responsibility of looking after his brother, and often feels that the people he hangs around with in the musician community are a bad influence. He wants to protect his brother from making the same mistakes twice and ending up in jail over drugs. Once the narrator takes time to actually talk to Sonny and learn about him he begins to see a new side of Sonny.

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is the story of a man named Sonny, told through the eyes of his brother, the narrator. The story tells a slice of Sonny’s life as he interacts with the narrator, and tells of Sonny’s escapades and all the things that he’s done in his life in order to escape his emptiness. While not apparent at first glance, the character of Sonny is very empty, and he turns to things like drugs and music, while the narrator himself turns away guilt, as a way to deal with each of their problems in life. The story of Sonny’s Blues is the story of two men trying to deal with their problems.

“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

Fictional writing is generally done just to entertain readers. Some authors create stories with a singular point of view, while others introduce more complex plots and storylines. When it comes to author James Baldwin’s short story Sonny’s Blues, there is much depth given to the storyline and the characters. Sonny’s Blues has been analyzed by many different people throughout time because the story has many elements. From Baldwin’s skillful use of metaphors and similes to his incorporation of religious references, this story is insightfully and complexly written. A simple story about a man and his brother leaves readers with an inside look into family, drug addiction, socioeconomic struggles in the Black community, and the language of Jazz

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” utilizes race, poverty, stereotypes, and adversity to shine a light on the struggle to escape circumstance. Throughout the text, Baldwin describes the hardships leaching the life out of Harlem’s black community from the narrator’s perspective. Sonny, the narrator’s brother, struggles with his identity and ability to feel emotion leading him to the world of music and drugs, “To be aware of oneself, Baldwin believes, is to feel a sense of loss, to know where we are and what we’ve left behind” (Murray 355). Truly knowing one’s identity comes at the cost of confronting the past. Pain, suffering, and tragedy make up the identity of men just as music expresses it. Sonny’s passion for music, as Murray points out in

Establishing and maintaining a certain identity mostly depends on the setting. The setting allows us to analyze someone at a deeper level. Considering the time, place and the circumstances around under which they respond allows us to explore them and determine their identity. In the short story “Sonny’s Blues”, James Baldwin conveys the message of how one goes about establishing and maintaining their identity on different levels by using elements of setting. The author uses elements of setting several times to convey the message but some of the prominent uses are the military service, life in Harlem and especially the use of

In the story “Sonny Blues” by James Baldwin, the story is comprised of dynamic characters that supports the overall theme of the story. Whether it be Sonny himself or Isabel, each character plays a prominent role in advancing the theme of the story which is the understanding of how music serves as an outlet for Sonny. Moreover, how his brother is taught to believe the world is a cruel place, thus attempting to protect Sonny and deny him his dream of music. This theory that Sonny’s brother, who remained nameless, believed was instilled into him by his mother before her passing. His mother tells the story of Sonny’s uncle who passed away at a young age. Though he is mentioned only once in the story, Sonny’s uncle adds to the overall theme of the story and

In “Sonny’s Blues” fictional story, Baldwin describes Sonny, the major character plagued with drugs and poverty. The setting majorly takes place in Harlem, a region characterized by social and economic struggle, just like it is in Africa. But this is not the central focus of the story, instead, it is racist thinking which makes Sonny’s brother assume Sonny is addicted to drugs because he descended in the world of poverty, prison and drugs. But Sonny decides to fight with such ambiguity by playing blues to reconnect with Africa Diaspora, which represents his true roots. It is when Sonny plays that his brother realizes it could help them to be free (Baldwin,

It is a common belief that the nurture aspect of our personal development has a lot to do with the way we see ourselves and the habits we form due to our past experiences. Unfortunately for Sonny, as well as for many other African Americans throughout history, even before the 1950’s, oppression had been a great burden to deal with on a day to day basis. In “Sonny’s Blues” the author James Baldwin provides us with a family whose lives revolve around this constant reminder that they are a minority and therefore, live a completely different life in Harlem, Manhattan New York where the influences and environment mainly keep one in trouble. Sonny was the brave exception in the family who allowed himself to openly have a fervor for jazz and grows spiritually, beyond the borders of restraint that oppression had placed on those who lived during these times, his passion towards jazz music definitely deepened his connection to his community, his cultural history, his family, and his interior consciousness.

The distorted perception of the narrator was unfavorable, moreover acted as a key feature in the pressed relationship between the main characters. James Baldwin’s protagonists in Sonny’s Blues were brothers who battled their excruciating external and internal conflicts. This dueling conflicts motivated Sonny to take control of the essence in his pain and release it through the notes of his music. Playing jazz notes with the instruments of Jazz, which was an outlet for Sonny, moreover the mimicking his personality. Sonny’s characteristics can be embodied by Jazz and/or Blues.

This fauvist painting by a french artist Henri Matisse, who is known for his use of color and his fluidity, shows the harmony in red. Every color has a psychological value. Color of the room influences our moods and thoughts. This painting follows a women arranging fruits on the table in a room dominated by beautiful red wallpaper. Red increases a room’s energy level.

The story, Sonny’s Blues, describes the lives of two brothers growing up in Harlem in the early 1960’s. Sonny and his brother are different in the way the go about life in general. They were both raised in the same household, yet they grew up to be totally different people. As the story progresses we see that both brothers have troubles in their lives and we get to see how each thinks and acts when facing such ordeals. While the brothers differ in the way they internalize and cope with their problems, they both show selfish characteristics, but ultimately feel remorseful for not being in each others’ lives.