October Sky Compare And Contrast

Going to school was not very important to Sonny so he didn’t go which caused more problems with his family so he went to the navy (48-49). After dropping out of school and leaving Sonny’s relationship with his brother was really nonexistent, all they did was argue until one-day Sonny told his brother he was dead to him (49). Sonny’s lack of support affected him emotionally, which led to drug use and eventually landed him in jail.

Mr. Baldwin made the older brother the narrator so the reader would not feel like Sonny was a dangerous man. The older brother seemed to apologize for Sonny while at the same time try to convince himself and the reader that Sonny really was not a bad guy. Sonny is really a hero and yet an anti-hero. He is someone that seems dangerous, lazy and extreme until you get to know him. The problem is that Sonny does not let people know him.

His mother shared a story with him about his father and his uncle. She wanted him to promise to take care of his brother. She may have had an idea that Sonny was in trouble. After their mother died Sonny told his brother that he didn’t want to stay in Harlem anymore. His brother wanted him to finish school and stay another year. He saw the worry and concern in Sonny’s eyes, but dismissed it. This was Sonny’s way of telling his brother that he needed help before it was too late. Sonny pulled away from him and stated, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.”

The narrator experienced a lot of problems throughout his life but managed to emerge victoriously from most of them. Even with this, he needs to support Sonny because this was his mother's dying wish. "The death of the narrator's daughter, Sonny's failure to fit in with his own family, a stint in the navy all serve to alienate the brothers, even after their mother made the narrator promise to keep an eye on young Sonny" (Smith 22). The fact that they were born in a harsh environment, society's views in regard to their racial background, and the fact that they experienced a lot of hardships during their lives all had a severe effect on the personalities of each of the brothers.

Reaching for your dreams is like looking at the Sunday newspaper comics, if you look from a far, you see the big picture, but if you look close, all you see are a bunch of dots put together. October Sky is a film based on Homer Hickam’s determination to win a national science fair. He is constantly ostracized by his community and family and does not have much money to support him either. Homer clearly doesn’t have a good chance at even getting to the science fair, let alone winning it. Many obstacles are in his way and he can’t even see his goal with all of them in the way. Somehow, he perceivers and finds a way to reach his goal. His friends did not believe in him, but later started to really believe and they all

When his brother asked him what he wanted to do, he quickly responded “I’m going to be a musician.” There wasn’t any thinking needed; he knew exactly what he wanted in life. Though the brother’s point of view we get to see how unimpressed he was that Sonny wanted to be a musician. “It seemed -beneath him, somehow,” Sonny’s brother wrote. Though the story is well written in the point of view that it is told in, the weaknesses are that the readers don’t get to see everything through Sonny’s eyes and see his struggles.

Eventually the narrator and invites him to live his family once he is released from prison and Sonny reluctantly agrees to live there until he finishes college. This is a big turning point in the narrator’s character because he had finally began to wonder “ about the life that Sonny had lived” (Baldwin 243) and started making his efforts to take care of his little brother like he once promised his mother.

Her older son has difficulty with her legacy because he chooses not to see. Where his mother was vigilant and quick to identify the weak areas in her family, her son is blind to them. The beginning of "Sonny's Blues" marks an awakening for him. He is faced with a printed truth about Sonny's drug addiction, and suddenly his world is penetrated from all directions. His own grief for the loss of his daughter focuses this new perception. "My trouble made his real" (429); he needs to reach out to Sonny in order to begin to resolve his own pain. Yet as he narrates the story, it becomes apparent that he has perceived very little along the way. Thoughts like "I had never really noticed it before," and "strange, suddenly, to watch, though I had been seeing... all my life" indicate the surprise that the narrator feels as he encounters his life on a new level (430-431). Eventually he comes to understand more clearly when Sonny says, "It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level" (432). However, he must first find a way to listen.

Sonny after Sonny's stay in the Navy, the narrator still viewed Sonny as if he

According to Reilly, the purpose of the story is to lead those reading Sonny’s Blues to sympathetically engage with the young man (Sonny) by digging in deep knowledge on human motives. The intention of the narrator, and

Later in the story, the narrator and Sonny somehow escape the troubled past that is now left behind.

Sonny understands this notion and yearns to enlist in the Navy; he was ready to lie about his age. He thought, “if I say I’m old enough, they’ll believe me”, this signifies how eager Sonny was to have the understanding and acceptance that his older brother had. After Sonny returned from the Navy, the narrator still imaged him as someone who “carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time”. He thought that Sonny had lost all prospects of reality and unfortunately his thoughts came out to be true. The narrators’ time spent in the military allowed him to make that judgment, therefore the setting of the military service established such an identity for the narrator, which made him successful in life and allowed him to help others as well. Also Sonny wanted to enlist in the army so it would take him away from the “killing streets” of Harlem and give him the opportunity to get a college education on the GI Bill.

As well as in the short story Sonny’s Blues, the main character, Sonny, is being criticized by his brother. Since the very beginning, their mother told the oldest one, ‘’ you got to hold on to your brother ’’ and that’s what he wanted to do, but Sonny took a different path than he did. Sonny was the kind of guy that was heroin-addicted and a jazz musician, but his older brother didn’t see all these sides of him. We discover all these sides by the use of flashback of the author throughout the major parts of the story. The author didn’t want us to see Sonny like his older brother was seeing him, he wanted us to see him as a poor, un-accepted guy that needed to be listened by his peers. The brother didn’t accept the journey that Sonny had taken, but if he would of saw the actual Sonny, and stop hiding in the darkness, he would of accepted him faster and understand that Sonny only wanted to show that he could do good things not only drugs. In the middle of the story, there is a flashback were we learn that actually Sonny is more experienced about life than his older brother, because Sonny was in drugs and was really affected by Harlem( the city they stayed in when they were younger). The brother had a pretty easy life; he became a teacher and had a little family. This demonstrates that we need support from our peers, to be able to continue without taking bad choices.

Furthermore, Sonny's individualism is a direct result of his unhappiness with conventional life. As a young man, Sonny is unable to get along with his father. He hates his home and school. His creative interest leads him to become isolated from his brother, who feels threatened by "his jazz-oriented life style and his continued attraction to Greenwich Village" (Albert 179). By the beginning of the story, Sonny has rejected his family and his home, constructing a new life as a musician and drug peddler in a new location foreign to the narrator.

"Sonny's Blues" opens with news that Sonny has been recently apprehended during a drug bust, which establishes that Sonny has had an ongoing problem with drug addiction, specifically heroin. While the narrator is apprehensive about contacting Sonny after this incident as the brother have lost touch over the years, he eventually reaches out to Sonny and gains insight into what Sonny has been doing during their estrangement; it is also during this time that the narrator recognizes that music is not only an artistic outlet for Sonny, but also provides an emotional and psychological catharsis for him and those that listen to his music. Sonny best describes his dependency on music as he talks to his brother after an old-fashioned revival meeting during which there was much singing. Sonny states,