Social Outcast In Sonny's Blues

Social Outcast

In the story Sonny’s Blues, we learn about two brother the narrator was the elder brother of the two and Sony was the young, suicidal, drug addicted, and talented brother. Throughout the beginning of the story, the narrator doesn’t bother to reach out to Sony. This was due to both brother had different view on what we call “The American Dream Life”. The narrator was the total opposite of Sony, he was a successful black man that was able to get out of the slummy area that was Harlem, he had a family, a decent paying job, and pretty much he was living “The American Dream Life". However, in the other hand Sony was more of a rebel, followed his passion, and a person that was trying to find their way into society. The reason, why

He starts reminiscing to the time when Sonny was in high school. This was due to the resemblance of characteristic that the kids in his class room had to his younger brother and because of the newspaper that he reading on the way to work. The narrator says, “These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.” (Weinberg 814). In fact, most

This lead them into the wrong pathway into society one full of violence, crime, and drug addiction. “One day a letter came from the school board and Isabel’s mother got it — there had, apparently, been other letters but Sonny had torn them up. This day, when Sonny came in, Isabel’s mother showed him the letter and asked where he’d been spending his time. And she finally got it out of him that he’d been down in Greenwich Village, with musicians and other characters, in a white girl’s apartment. And this scared her and she started to scream at him and what came up, once she began — though she denies it to this day — was what sacrifices they were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little he appreciated it.” (Weinberg 832). In here it was clear that Sonny was all ready falling into the wrong pathway in life. He started diching school, hanging with the wrong people, and lying to the person that cared about him. Sonny action later on in his life affected him. He started selling drug, using heroin, and getting arrested by the cops. “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.”(Weinberg 814). In here, the narrator gives the senses that it is pointless to teaching math to