Sonny's Blues Essay

James Badlwin’s short story Sonny’s Blues is told from the perspective of The Narrator, a high school algebra teacher who is married with children. At the story's beginning, the narrator is on a train where he reads in the newspaper about his little brother Sonny, who is in prison due to his drug addiction. There’s a flashback from when they were in the same room together at their mother's funeral. Sonny reveals that he wants to be a jazz pianist after high school but the narrator dismisses his idea arguing that he won't get anywhere financially. Towards the end of the story when the two brothers make up, Sonny invites the narrator to a jazz club, where he meets his friend Creole and his other band friends. The band plays, and Creole changes

Blues music has a deep connection to African American history. In fact, Kimberley Ruffins's article, “Blues in African American-Cultures” addresses how blues music has become a symbol of the many traumatizing moments that recognize and brings the community together as a whole. “ Given the dynamic and pervasive influence of the blues in American and African-American literature throughout the major monumental shifts in black people's lives: enslavement, emancipation, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Civil Rights movement...As the blues emerged as an identifiable musical style around the end of the 19th century, black communities were struggling to enter the wage labor force with little, if any, support”(Ruffin) The theme of being trapped or struggling is nothing new, and can be repeated many times throughout the story, especially from the timezone in Harlem, when many African Americans were discriminate for who they were. . The one thing that each character is looking for is how to cope with their difficulties or "find that light in the darkness. Creole, who is Sonny's music teacher, describes to the narrator that music feels like the only escape from reality. "For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in this darkness"

In Keith Byerman’s “Words and Music: Narrative Ambiguity in Sonny’s Blues”, he states musicians will use music to cope with a negative, as they try to tell their audience how they feel. In other words, instead of talking, musicians use music to communicate as if they were bluntly talking."But the man who created the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason”(Byerman). While Sonny is playing the piano with Creole, the narrator realizes his playing is slow and sorrowful. Since Sonny would always get shut out from the world and his brother, playing music was the only way he was eligible to speak his mind. While Sonny was playing with the band, the narrator noticed that Sonny had a calm look on his face as if he had nothing to worry about. The Narrator realized that if Sonny were to keep playing music, he'd have nothing to worry about until the day that he dies. "Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest on earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy"(Baldwinp.140). The reason Sonny wanted to become a musician was