Suffering In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

“Sonny’s Blues” is about complex relationship between two brothers living in Harlem. The story is narrated with the first-person who discovers about his younger brother’s arrest in the newspaper for using and selling heroine. The narrator, who is a school teacher, reveals how life is difficult in the ghetto. In contrast, his brother, Sonny, is a musician who has led a wilder life. Since the author has real life experience of living in Harlem, he understands it problems effectively. As such, he uses elements such as the cup of trembling, light and darkness, and housing projects to highlight the challenges his characters faces in Harlem.The Cup of TremblingAt the conclusion of the story, the narrator describes a glass sitting over Sonny's piano

As a musician, Sonny takes his misery and that of people around him and changes it into something beautiful. Like characters from the Bible, Sonny chooses salvation, but his fate is uncertain. Perhaps, his suffering is a price paid for being an artist. Moreover, there is something Christlike concerning Sonny's agony, and his suffering is at once redemptive and inevitable (King and Lynn 35-37). In fact, at the end of the text, it remains unclear whether he will continue suffering from playing music or whether a greater redemption and peace await everyone involved. Further, the fact that glass remains filled with milk and scotch highlights the duality and tension Sonny faces.Light and DarknessLight and darkness are in continuous tension throughout Sonny's Blues, and the scholar utilizes them to highlight hope, warmth, gloom, and despair that mark his characters' lives. Baldwin uses light to define Sonny's face when he was underdeveloped and pleasure that resulted from sitting in a room full of grown-ups after

On the contrary, darkness threatens the characters in the story. The night, which exemplifies social and personal challenges, can be discovered everywhere. Literary, the darkness haunts the figures in the text, something they are aware of when the sun goes down. Similarly, Sonny's problems in prison, addiction to drugs, and the condition of life in Harlem are exemplified by the darkness (King and Lynn 47-49). Ultimately, the light comes to signify comfort, salvation, and love, while darkness represents the misery and fear that persistently threatens to extinguish it.Housing ProjectsThe housing developments in Harlem were for Baldwin symbols of fall and decline. He describes the initiatives as "rocks in the middle of a boiling sea” (King and Lynn 66). Indeed, it is an image meant to convey the unpleasant conditions of life inside of the tasks in Harlem. Additionally, the phrase has a biblical suggestion as it invokes a form of hell on Earth. Scholars indicate that as rocks in a boiling sea, the ventures are lifeless, massive objects surrounded by depression. Mostly, the projects represent a pervasion of the world in which efficient ideas are living