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Light And Darkness In Sonny's Blues

683 Words3 Pages

Sonny’s blues uses light and darkness symbolism to elucidate on the painfulness of reality and the vigor gotten through it. Darkness is the fact that life in Harlem is dreadful, clouded with drugs, crime and societal discrimination. The tenacious society coaxes youth towards a life of murkiness. Sonny gets addicted to heroin while trying to unchain his musical innovativeness. He used music as his edifice, in this book he tries to escape towards the light and a life with thought drugs. Light and darkness are juxtaposed with truth and reality, which makes up a symbol to delineate sonny and his brother’s struggles. Sonny blue’s begins with a metaphorical statement: "I stared at it in the swinging light of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside". This contradistinction shows the bleakness of the main characters hometown of Harlem. Here …show more content…

Darkness creates a dearth of chances. There is darkness in which the students are trapped in but are alien to the light and consequently have no future. The reminiscing done by the narrator on sonny and his childhood succors to expound more on light and darkness. He also reckons the importance of the silence and "the darkness growing against the windowpanes". He believes the darkness is generational and originates from the past in his family. He believes that light originates from knowledge on life. "The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely….And when the light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness." Realization of this light is disheartening. Subjection to life breaks a child’s integrity and can lead to guile and this darkness can entice the child to live in it. The narrator express that darkness can be overcome by the light because it enlightens us and gives us comprehension of

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