The Role Of Brother In Sonny's Blues

As I read through “Sonny's Blues”, to familiarize myself with the story again, I began to build my argument against the narrator/brother. The conclusion that I have drawn is simply that the brother plays a pivotal role in this story from its beginning to the end. The first impression is that the brother doesn't seem to feel anything, when he reads about his brother’s incarceration in the paper. He seems to be mindless yet deep in thought of Sonny, both as a young boy and now as a grown man. How did his brother come to be delivered at this place? Because all of our paths in life are not forged out by ourselves alone, the people that we are around such as our family, friends, passerby’s, and our life events are key in who we will become or

Spurred on by a sense of his brother’s growing curiosity, Sonny grapples for the right words to communicate his experience of a heroin-induced alterity. He begins by drawing an analogy to the revival scene he has just carefully studied: ‘[H]er [the singer’s] voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes—when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And—and sure.’ He sipped his beer, very deliberately not looking at me. I watched his face. ‘It makes you feel—in control. Sometimes you’ve got to have that feeling’ (Calborn 131). His brother was seated alone; he sat there taking in the atmosphere and the people, watching them and their interactions with each other. He knew he was in a different world, one all its own. The musicians gathered on stage, everyone watching them, waiting for the first notes of music to begin. He was listening, thinking, wondering and now beginning to understand all that Sonny was about. The music had been explained to him by Sonny as powerful based on the things a person had lived through; this power gave them the depth of great music. His brother was seeing the life of torture of Sonny, the battle within was coming from the tips of his fingers. He saw for the first time the life glowing from within, the

When Sonny is released from prison, the narrator brings him back to live with his family in Harlem and begins trying to repair their relationship. (“Jazz and Literature” Part