Jeremy Raymond
Professor Gazzara
ENG 102-109
April 6th, 2013
It Takes Two To Tango What makes a relationship dysfunctional? Is it the changes one sees in another whether they be physical, emotional, or financial? Is it a change in their own personality that is now changing their views on their family member or significant other? Tina B. Tessina defines a dysfunctional relationship as this: Dysfunctional Relationships are relationships that do not perform their appropriate function; that is, they do not emotionally support the participants, foster communication among them, appropriately challenge them, or prepare or fortify them for life in the larger world. (Tessina 1) In "Sonny 's Blues" and "Shiloh", we see two different types
…show more content…
The death of their child spurred the brother into writing to his troubled brother Sonny. Sonny was the younger brother of the two who has been through many difficult life lessons throughout his short life so far. Sonny has suffered from a heroin addiction which landed him in a local jail which further weakened the bond between the two brothers. Sonny 's brother has lived in Harlem and has seen heroin addicts and victims of alcoholism and has showed no remorse for them. We see Sonny 's brothers intolerance for the men around Harlem who suffer from an addiction when he is talking to an old friend of Sonny 's after he leaves the school one day. "Look. Don’t tell me your sad story, if it was up to me, I 'd give you one." (294). This shows how Sonny 's brother is indifferent regarding people who have suffered from a addiction. While Sonny was in jail, the relationship continued to dwindle. After Sonny 's release from prison, their relationship began to heal. In addition to his drug addiction, Sonny 's inability to decide on a career in life irritates his brother. Sonny 's aspirations spread as far as India, a military job stationed throughout the world , and/or landing a job as a musician in his hometown of Harlem. This inconsistency of Sonny enrages his older brother, who has made a promise with their mother to look after him and make sure he grows up to be a proper man. In contrast to the relationship between Norma Jean and Leroy, Sonny and his brothers
The story begins by telling the readers how Sonny’s brother learned of him being in jail from a newspaper article (29), one might automatically infer that their relationship isn’t so good. It makes you wonder how much influence Sonny’s brother had when it came to how his life ended up. At one point in the beginning of the story his brother even asks himself if he had anything to do with it (33), as if to help the readers with the already occurring thought that maybe he could have helped his brother, maybe he could have been there and done more. Later on, he talks about the promise he made to his mother to take care of his brother, to lift him up and not let him fall (42). He had a responsibility to his little brother and he ultimately let him down, he let him fall and wasn’t around to help him back up when he needed it the most.
The narrator always wanted the best for his younger brother Sonny. Sonny from the beginning of the story has a hard history of using drugs, ending up in jail, and not finishing school. Once both of their parents had passed, the
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 communication 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.
His mother shared a story with him about his father and his uncle. She wanted him to promise to take care of his brother. She may have had an idea that Sonny was in trouble. After their mother died Sonny told his brother that he didn’t want to stay in Harlem anymore. His brother wanted him to finish school and stay another year. He saw the worry and concern in Sonny’s eyes, but dismissed it. This was Sonny’s way of telling his brother that he needed help before it was too late. Sonny pulled away from him and stated, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say.”
The narrator experienced a lot of problems throughout his life but managed to emerge victoriously from most of them. Even with this, he needs to support Sonny because this was his mother's dying wish. "The death of the narrator's daughter, Sonny's failure to fit in with his own family, a stint in the navy all serve to alienate the brothers, even after their mother made the narrator promise to keep an eye on young Sonny" (Smith 22). The fact that they were born in a harsh environment, society's views in regard to their racial background, and the fact that they experienced a lot of hardships during their lives all had a severe effect on the personalities of each of the brothers.
When Sonny moves in with the family, he is given the expectation to finish college and stay out of trouble. Sonny has other ideas though and skips his classes to go to the local jazz club and play music. When the narrator first learns of Sonny’s antics he is very disappointed and is frustrated that Sonny continues to pursue a musical career. He believes it is part of the reason that Sonny has had so much trouble in the past and doesn’t believe it is a positive thing for his brother. Sonny is immediately kicked out and the two go for another extended period of time until talking again. Eventually the narrator has another change of heart and invites his brother to live with him again and Sonny agrees. The two struggle to communicate so one day Sonny invites the narrator to come watch him play at the jazz club and it is then that the narrator truly understands his younger brother. He is watching Sonny play with a group of musicians when he sees “Sonny’s face is trouble” (Baldwin 254) with the difficulty in
And this was partly because Sonny was the apple of his father 's eye. It was because he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him, that he was always fighting with him. It doesn 't do any good to fight with Sonny…But the principal reason that they never hit it off is that they were so much alike.” (225). Sonny 's father was an alcoholic who did not know how to properly convey his love for him, this causes Sonny to compensate for his tumultuous upbringing by constantly burying the emotions he feels inside. These descriptions are a stark contrast to the way that Narrator is introduced as a successful man in the community of Harlem; he’s an algebra teacher with a wife and kids who distances himself from, not only those inferior to him, but towards his own brother too. He’s a practical man with a darker, far more cynical view of the world that surrounds him. By social standards, Narrator is an upstanding citizen who is the bright spot in his community for making something of himself with a stable career and life. Sonny has seemingly failed at reaching that level by only becoming another predictably, failed product of a community that expects this type of outcome. He is a jazz musician with an addiction problem who has a naïve, sunny point of view about the world. When two brothers who ultimately don’t share the same views, profession, or beliefs the difficulty to find a connection is only inevitable.
Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin is a short story about two brothers that overcome many obstacles in their lives such as housing problems, death, discrimination, drug addiction, and imprisonment. Baldwin tends to use a lot of symbolism, allegories and imagery within the text as well. This story expresses the overall theme of suffering that Black Americans faced during the 1950s. The link between music, drugs, and environment play a large role when it comes to the characters suffering.
A big problem throughout this story was the arguments between the older and younger brother on what the younger brother should do with his life. I could definitely relate to Sonny in the younger brother perspective, because I am the youngest of three and we have a big age difference so I felt that pressure from older siblings about what I should do in life. “I want to talk about your brother, If anything happens to me he ain’t going to have nobody to look out for him” (Baldwin, 572). This quote was spoken by Sonny’s mom, she wanted the older brother to basically look out for Sonny when she’s gone, which forces the brother to kind of become this parent role to his younger brother, Sonny. I could resonate with this quote a lot because whenever my parents were out of town or just out for the day, they always told my older siblings they had to watch me and basically care for me when I was younger. This part of the story reminded me of that time in my life. I could also relate to how
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
The narrator says that he “couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn’t wanted to know” (Baldwin600). The narrator and Sonny haven’t spoken much since the death of their mother. The narrator wanted Sonny to stay in school and finish, and Sonny wanted to drop out and join the army or the navy, and then chase his dream of being a jazz piano player. Sonny agreed to stay in school at first, but after a while, he stopped going and eventually ran away and joined the army. After not hearing from Sonny in years, the narrator heard from him out of nowhere when he was deployed in Greece. Both Sonny and the narrator were living in New York years after the war was over. They would meet sometimes, but it would always result in a fight, and eventually the narrator and Sonny stopped speaking. Before their mother died, she told the narrator to look after his brother. She said “it ain’t only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under” (Baldwin607). So when Sonny got arrested for heroin, the narrator felt some guilt and that it was sort of his fault, but at the same time, he felt that he wanted nothing to do with him and his troubles. The narators confusion on the matter was put to a rest when he ran into one of Sonny’s friends right after the arrest, and his friend made it clear that as soon as Sonny got out he would go
The story, Sonny’s Blues, describes the lives of two brothers growing up in Harlem in the early 1960’s. Sonny and his brother are different in the way the go about life in general. They were both raised in the same household, yet they grew up to be totally different people. As the story progresses we see that both brothers have troubles in their lives and we get to see how each thinks and acts when facing such ordeals. While the brothers differ in the way they internalize and cope with their problems, they both show selfish characteristics, but ultimately feel remorseful for not being in each others’ lives.
As well as in the short story Sonny’s Blues, the main character, Sonny, is being criticized by his brother. Since the very beginning, their mother told the oldest one, ‘’ you got to hold on to your brother ’’ and that’s what he wanted to do, but Sonny took a different path than he did. Sonny was the kind of guy that was heroin-addicted and a jazz musician, but his older brother didn’t see all these sides of him. We discover all these sides by the use of flashback of the author throughout the major parts of the story. The author didn’t want us to see Sonny like his older brother was seeing him, he wanted us to see him as a poor, un-accepted guy that needed to be listened by his peers. The brother didn’t accept the journey that Sonny had taken, but if he would of saw the actual Sonny, and stop hiding in the darkness, he would of accepted him faster and understand that Sonny only wanted to show that he could do good things not only drugs. In the middle of the story, there is a flashback were we learn that actually Sonny is more experienced about life than his older brother, because Sonny was in drugs and was really affected by Harlem( the city they stayed in when they were younger). The brother had a pretty easy life; he became a teacher and had a little family. This demonstrates that we need support from our peers, to be able to continue without taking bad choices.
Furthermore, Sonny's individualism is a direct result of his unhappiness with conventional life. As a young man, Sonny is unable to get along with his father. He hates his home and school. His creative interest leads him to become isolated from his brother, who feels threatened by "his jazz-oriented life style and his continued attraction to Greenwich Village" (Albert 179). By the beginning of the story, Sonny has rejected his family and his home, constructing a new life as a musician and drug peddler in a new location foreign to the narrator.
In the article Reflective Consideration of Pattern-Dynamic and Development Factors (chapter 7), I learned how client's behaviors whether destructive or not can be directly related to something that occurred in his/her past. One example the article talked about was when the woman did not want to lessen the conflict with her husband because she did not feel comfortable with their sexual relationship; therefore, she felt "safer" not being on good terms with him. This case resonated with me because we often witness unhealthy relationships not knowing or understanding the possible reasoning behind what makes the individual not work to make the relationship healthy.