Sonny's Blues



Sonny's Blues

"Sonny's Blues" is a first-person account by an African-American schoolteacher trying to come to terms with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz musician and sometime heroin addict. Some of James Baldwin's thematic preoccupations can be ascertained by noting the subtle variations and quasi-musical interplay of motifs: darkness (both atmospheric and existential), (in) audible attempts to articulate or testify, and the spatial coordinates of inside/outside (a complex motif entailing withdrawal into privacy, the filling of voids, and the impulse to escape or transcend compression). First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1957) and later included in his only collection of stories, going to meet the Man (1965), "Sonny's Blues" is James Baldwin's best-known and most often anthologized short story (Baldwin, 1998). It is about Sonny and his relationship with his brother, the nameless narrator. Although they were reared during the Great Depression in the tumultuous and even violent reality of their urban environment, Harlem, Sonny and his brother took different paths in life after the death of their parents. While Sonny had become a jazz musician and drug abuser, his brother, seven years Sonny's senior, had become a high school math teacher. Distanced from Sonny by a generation and by their life choices and lifestyle, the narrator, at the beginning of the story, learns from the morning newspaper that Sonny has been arrested the previous night for using and selling heroin. On his way to the subway station at the end of his workday, the narrator is met by one of Sonny's nameless friends, a drug addict who, more than likely, first turned Sonny on to drugs. He brings the news of Sonny's arrest and inevitable imprisonment. Ironically, in listening to Sonny's friend, the narrator comes to the realization that, over the years, he failed to listen to his younger ...