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Essay Comparing Sonny's Blues And Twyla

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Does our social class define our position in the world? This is the question raised by the short stories Sonny’s Blues and Recitatif. James Baldwin’s Sonny and Toni Morrison’s Twyla both struggle to find their proper place in society – Sonny by moving away from the Harlem projects where he grew up; Twyla by leaving the orphanage where her mother abandons her. However, both characters encounter unexpected difficulties along the way: Sony grapples with heroin addiction and the disapproval of his own family; Twyla combats the anger of her oldest friend and the institutionalized racism of 1960s America. For both characters, the question remains the same: can an “outsider” find a place in a class-obsessed society? The thesis, the central question of the two stories is the same; can an outsider blocked by class issues ever become an “insider”? Or is society itself the thing that needs to change? Interestingly, …show more content…

That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s” (Wagner-Martin and Davidson 159). It is hard to image a more solemn, dirge-like, and restrained opening to a short story. Though Twyla (Morrison’s protagonist and narrator) is not literally an orphan, she is left at St. Bonaventure’s orphanage by a mother who is unable or unwilling to care for her. When she talks of her mother’s difficulties, Twyla only states that she “likes to dance all night,” which seems to hint at either alcoholism, drug addiction, or some form of mental illness (Wagner-Martin and Davidson 159). After being dropped at the orphanage, Twyla is quickly paired with Roberta – who is white to her black, or black to her white: it is impossible to say which; although Morrison states that the two girls are of different races, she deliberately never clarifies which girl is which: and though it seems more likely that Twyla is the African-American of the pair, it would be presumptuous to assume

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