Critical Essay - "Sonny's Blues"

Emily Spencer

August 30, 2010

ENG2510: Contemporary Literature

Conflict and Understanding in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”

(___ words)

In James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, the narrator, a teacher in Harlem, has escaped the ghetto, creating a stable and secure life for himself despite the destructive pressures that he sees destroying so many young blacks. He sees African American adolescents discovering the limits placed on them by a racist society at the very moment when they are discovering their abilities. He tells the story of his relationship with his younger brother, Sonny. That relationship has moved through phases of separation and return. After their parents’ deaths, he tried and failed to be a father to Sonny. For a while, he believed that Sonny has succumbed to the destructive influences of Harlem life. Finally, however, they achieved a reconciliation in which the narrator came to understand the value and the importance of Sonny’s need to be a jazz pianist.

The story opens with a crisis in their relationship. The narrator reads in the newspaper that Sonny was taken into custody in a drug raid. He learns that Sonny is addicted to heroin and that he will be sent to a treatment facility to be “cured”. Unable to believe that his gentle and quiet brother could have so abused himself, the narrator cannot reopen communications with Sonny until a second crisis occurs, the death of his daughter from polio. When Sonny is released, the narrator brings him to live with his family.

As the narrator is having a flashback, he remembers his last talk with his mother, in which she made him promise to “be there” for Sonny. While home on leave from the army, he has seen little of Sonny, who is then in school. His mother tells him about the death of his uncle, a story she had kept from him until this moment. His uncle, much loved by his father, was killed in a hit-and-run accident by a group of drunken whites who miscalculated in an attempt to...