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Comparing Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin And The Rich Brother, By Tobias Wolff

694 Words3 Pages

The relationship between brothers can vary from them hating each other to having an inseparable bond. There’s a common saying that no matter what happens, one is always responsible for the members in their family. The two stories “Sonny’s Blues”, by James Baldwin, and “The Rich Brother”, by Tobias Wolff include the lives of two adult brothers, and incorporate this idea in some way. A suggestion of how siblings are supposed to act is that they should support each other, but also get into occasional bickers, eventually growing out of them once they reach adulthood. Grudges that siblings can hold as children are little things such as which child is liked more by their parents, who is better at video games, and other things that shouldn’t matter once they reach adulthood. In these stories, this is not the case. There is still a grudge that the older brother …show more content…

The older brothers both have a hard time understanding their younger brothers, and it is hard for them to create a bond that would help the communication between the two. Although both older brothers struggle with this, the brother in “The Rich Brother” struggles less than the brother in “Sonny’s Blues”. In “Sonny’s Blues”, the younger brother is incarcerated for using and selling of drugs, and is in need of help from his older brother. Before the mother died, she told the older brother to promise he won’t let anything happen to Sonny, so he has an obligation to help him out. Sonny tells his brother that he wants to play piano, going against the norm, but his brother finds him crazy because he has never picked up an instrument in his life. The older brother never really understands his brother and why he wants to do this, but instead accepts the fact that he is doing what he does because it makes him happy at the end of the story, but never really gives him his

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