Sonny's Blues Literary Analysis Essay

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‘Sonny’s Blues’ was written by James Baldwin about the story of two brothers. The narrator and his brother Sonny are the main characters and their pain and sorrow are the part of their life. The narrator and his brother learn to deal with their pain and suffering. I believe that the narration was perfect because the author uses dialogue and mind reading of the main character because he is stating how the narrator feels also his father, his mother and also Sonny feels. I think one of the climaxes of the story was when narrator remembers how Sonny and their dad used to fight with each other. He also remembers that he saw his mother on vacation from the army, and she told him to take care of his brother. After that conversion with …show more content…

The narrator does not like Sonny because how Sonny is not planning for his future and the narrator thinks that Sonny could not make living off playing music. Sonny always tries to explain to his brother that he wants to make his career in a music, but his brother never tries to understand him. The narrator realizes that what Sonny wants to explain him whole time when Sonny made a live performance at the nightclub. When Sonny was living with his brother in the apartment he told his brother all he wanted to have someone listen to him in his life, saying “you realize nobody’s listening. So you’ve got to listen. You got to find a way to listen” (114). Sonny’s brother finally listen to him with full attention because he is seeing how happy Sonny is when he plays piano in the nightclub. One of the reasons the narrator realizes why Sonny loves playing music was when he heard Sonny’s performance from other people and notices this, when Creole tells that the blues gave a “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 all this darkness” (117). The narrator notice how free his brother Sonny flees by watching his performance, saying “freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we listen,