Drug Abuse In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s classic short story “Sonny’s Blues,” features emotional topics like struggles, addiction, and love. The story takes place in Harlem, New York in the early 1950’s, and revolves around the narrator’s perspective on Sonny’s life and the impact the community had around them.
In their youth, both the Narrator and Sonny lived in the projects infested with drug abuse, impecuniosity, violence, and racism. Into their adulthood, both would live thoroughly different lives. The narrator is prosperous, he has a wife, two children, and a good job as a high school teacher. While his brother is a homeless drug addict on the erroneous side of the law. The Narrator insists that Sonny’s struggles is him being a product of his own environment.

Haplessly, after their mother’s death, Sonny’s life has been marred by prison and drug abuse. The Narrator makes this clear when he assesses, “He had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment downtown, for peddling and using heroin.” (83). This is the first we really hear of Sonny or his drug use, and the statement is direct. There is no sugarcoating the presence of drugs in this story and Sonny’s addiction would ultimately lead him to a life of a convicted felon. The Narrator made it obvious describing Sonny’s situation when he said, “Yet, when he smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother, I’d never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.” (82). The narrator makes this observation about Sonny when he optically discerns him after he’s relinquished from prison. Prison, for Sonny, was a hellish experience, as was his addiction to drugs. His addiction to narcotics has led him to a life of malefaction, and solitude. And has impacted not just himself, but additionally his relationship with the Narrator. “Yet it had happened and here I was, talking about algebra to a lot of boys who might, every one of them for all I knew, be popping off needles every time they went to the head. Maybe it did more for them than algebra could.” (4). The narrator sort of senses the futility of trying to teach high school