James Baldwin - Sonny’s Blues

            I enjoyed reading the short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin.  The narrator’s mother asks him to be his brother’s keeper.  After their mother dies, Donny’s life is ruined by prison and drug abuse.  There is so much tension between the two brothers that at one point, Sonny tells his brother to consider him dead from that point on.  The narrator turns his back on his brother and fails to respond to Sonny when he is in prison at first.  At this point he has failed to live up to his mother’s commandment to watch over his brother but this failure is only temporary.  By the end of the story, the narrator takes Sonny back into his home.  He finally takes on the role of his brother’s keeper.  He constantly watched and worried over Sonny as he emerged from the darkness of prison and drug abuse.  Harlem is overwhelmed with drugs, poverty, and frustration.  The narrator was angered by one of Sonny’s old drug-addict friends but in the end he offers the man money.  Sonny’s problems helped the people around him endure and survive by channeling their frustrated desires into his music.  The characters in this poem are trapped physically and emotionally.  Throughout the story, the narrator and Sonny are always struggling to break free from one obstacle or another.  Sonny is physically imprisoned in jail as well as by his addiction to drugs.  The narrator is restricted to Harlem and to the housing projects that he clearly despises.  He is also trapped within himself, unable to express his emotions or live up to his obligations as a brother.  His daughter’s death gave him the motivation that he needed to change.  Sonny is able to express his frustration and rage through being a musician.  He is able to break loose and live as free as any man while he is playing the piano.  The narrator lives his life trapped inside of himself.  He has a hard time communicating with his brother and he even fails to do so because he cannot bear the emotions that come with it.  In the end he is temporarily freed by Sonny, his music offers him a rare glimpse into himself.  Baldwin uses light and darkness in recurrent tension throughout the poem.  He uses them to highlight the warmth, hope, gloom, and despair that mark his character’s lives.  He uses light to describe Sonny’s face when he was young and the warmth that came from sitting in a room full of adults after church.  Light represents all of the positive and hopeful elements of life.  It also symbolizes a form of salvation and grace.  To live in the light is to live a proper, good life.  The darkness constantly threatens the characters in the story.  The darkness represents a list of social and personal problems, which can be found everywhere.  The darkness literally haunts the figures in the story.  They are aware of all the figures once the sun goes down.  Sonny’s life in prison, his addiction to drugs, and the general state of life in Harlem are all personified by the darkness.  The darkness is always balanced against a measure of light.  Light comes to indicate salvation, comfort, and love.  Darkness is the fear and emptiness that always threatens to extinguish the light.                                                        

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Sonny’s Blues.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.