What Are Two Important Quotes From Sonny's Blues

In Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin, Sunny, the main character, used his natural will to allow his music to express his inner thoughts and feelings. When Sunny was in high school he turned to drugs because he felt trapped by what he wanted to do versus what he was supposed to do. He wanted to be a jazz musician and go to the military before he finished high school, but his older brother, who was his guardian, did not understand why Sunny would want to do any of that: “Well, look, Sunny, I’m sorry, don’t get mad. I just don’t altogether get it, that’s all” (30). Using his natural right to do whatever activity he wants, Sunny learned how to play piano even if his brother did not comprehend why he wanted to play it in the first place. Feeling restricted,

Once released from jail, Sunny went back to his childhood town to live him with his brother. Getting back into music, Sunny found a nightclub to play the piano at. One night he invited his brother to come and see him play. At the nightclub, Sunny began to struggle to play during the set: “He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have a direction, panicked again, got stuck” (46). It took a lot of natural will for Sunny to go on stage after not playing the piano for over a year. In the second set, it was as if a new person had emerged because he began to play in a way he had never played before: “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained many others. And Sunny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a

The narrator is a black man who upon giving a speech at his high school graduation is asked to give the same speech to the town’s leading white citizens at a local hotel by a white school superintendent. Arriving at the hotel, he was forced to participate in a blindfolded boxing match with nine other black males. The event that the white males had the black males and him do next was the most humiliating and degrading thing possible, there was an electrical rug with money on it and they made all the males pick it off the rug. The sad thing was, they didn’t know it was electrical or that the gold coins on the rug were just worthless brass token. The white men felt no remorse and were entertained and excited to see the scene: “This ought to be good. These niggers look like they’re about to pray!” (8) At this point, the narrator should have seen how he was being disrespected by these men and use his natural will to stand up for himself, but he didn’t. He let these men control him and manipulate him to do what they wanted him to do instead of him standing up for himself and using his natural will to tell them he only came there to read his speech, nothing more. The white men got exactly what they wanted by the narrator not standing up for himself. The men not only took away his natural right to be intelligent and share that intelligence, they took away his natural right to be different than the other black