The Symbolism Of Grace's Death In Grace By James Baldwin

Grace is one of the most significant symbols seen in the story. The suffering created by Grace's death is a tragedy that ends the estrangement between the narrator and Sonny. In the story, Grace is two years old and the youngest daughter of the narrator and his wife Isabel. Grace has suffered a slight fever for a few days, but it does not seem serious so the narrator and Isabel do not feel the need to call a doctor. One day, Grace is awake playing while Isabel is in the kitchen making lunch for the boys when they arrive home from school and she suddenly hears Grace fall down in the living room. Baldwin writes, “When you have a lot of children you don’t always start running when one of them falls, unless they start screaming or something” (283). However, this time it is different when Grace falls, she is quiet

Sadly, Grace dies of polio in the fall and it is her death that leads to the reconciliation of the narrator and his brother. According to Stone, “this tragic event may seem unrelated to the brothers’ reconciliation, and it is mentioned twice in the entirety of the tale. However, a closer inspection of Grace and her death reveals they are symbolic, paradoxical elements of the narrative that underlie it and serve to illuminate the tension and reconciliation between the narrator and Sonny” (251). Grace’s name is symbolic. Stone says, “Grace, in the Bible, stands for the unmerited favor of God” (252). Both the narrator and Sonny need grace but in different ways. “When the narrator loses his daughter Grace, he simultaneously identifies with the pain and darkness in Sonny’s life and realizes his own loss of grace, resulting from the broken promises that he made to his mother the last time he saw her” (Tackach 5). And the reason Sonny needs grace is because he is trapped in a life of drugs and imprisonment. Stone writes, “Sonny’s fall from grace is a literal one, in Christian