Judgment In Puppy And Sonny's Blues

The way a person acts could change another’s life forever, for better or for worse, whenever it might persist as verbal or physical. The short stories “The Follower” by Jack Gantos and “Sucker” by Carson McCullers both illustrate events in which one’s actions had negative lasting effects on another. This essay will examine the poor actions by characters in the text and the effects those actions triggered. “The Follower” by Jack Gantos features three main characters. Jack, a tween who meets two brothers who lives next door, Scary Gary and Frankie.

As we examined the essay “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Rich Brother” that may not have a great deal in common, but with more analysis in to the stories it becomes clear that they are similar but still have their own uniqueness. The stories are “The rich brother” which was written by Tobias Wolff is known for short stories or memoir and “Sonny’s Blues” which was written by James Baldwin also an American writer best known for its eloquence or rhetorical force in his writing. Both writers a best known for their famous writing than span for decades.

In “ Sonny’s Blues “ the narrator and Sonny go to a club where Sonny will be

In the story of “The Rich Brother”, from the author Tobias Wolff, and “Sonny’s Blues” by writer James Baldwin, both stories have brothers that succeed and failed. In “The Rich Brother” Pete is the oldest and Donald the youngest, Pete has his life put together, a family, and while the youngest is trying to find himself his lost. In “Sonny’s Blues” the narrator is the oldest brother and Sonny is the youngest, the unnamed narrator is an English teacher who was in the army and has a family, Sonny is a musician that makes bad decisions. Both brothers have an age gap therefore, they view life in different ways, but they only have each other.

Sonny’s Blues is a short story written by James Baldwin. The story takes place in Harlem during the early 1950’s. The story talks about two brothers working on their broken relationship. The story begins with the narrator reading the newspaper about his little brother Sonny getting arrested, because he was caught in a heroin bust. In the story the author James Baldwin uses a biblical allusion, a cup of trembling, to compare Sonny’s suffering to the suffering servant, since they have similar suffering. As you read the story and the verse you notice a lot of similarity between them. Reasons why, because characters in both the story and the verse feel trapped in where they live, most of them suffer in life, many seek and get guidance, and most of them heal in certain ways.

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.

Sonny’s Blues is a novella with Sonny and his brother a teacher as main characters; Sonny engaged in drug use and peddling an act that landed him prison where his brother visited him and eventually on release he lived with him. Sonny’s parents died at different times during the racial segregation epoch in America, they were African-Americans who suffered victimization. Before her mother’s death, she had instructed Sonny’s senior brother - a teacher- to take care of him because the surrounding world was dark symbolic for unfriendly. The theme of brotherly love begins when their mother requests them

Her older son has difficulty with her legacy because he chooses not to see. Where his mother was vigilant and quick to identify the weak areas in her family, her son is blind to them. The beginning of "Sonny's Blues" marks an awakening for him. He is faced with a printed truth about Sonny's drug addiction, and suddenly his world is penetrated from all directions. His own grief for the loss of his daughter focuses this new perception. "My trouble made his real" (429); he needs to reach out to Sonny in order to begin to resolve his own pain. Yet as he narrates the story, it becomes apparent that he has perceived very little along the way. Thoughts like "I had never really noticed it before," and "strange, suddenly, to watch, though I had been seeing... all my life" indicate the surprise that the narrator feels as he encounters his life on a new level (430-431). Eventually he comes to understand more clearly when Sonny says, "It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level" (432). However, he must first find a way to listen.

According to Reilly, the purpose of the story is to lead those reading Sonny’s Blues to sympathetically engage with the young man (Sonny) by digging in deep knowledge on human motives. The intention of the narrator, and

My general reaction to sonny’s blue it I like how the narrator gave us the readers an insight to his life and how he lived. I could  tell was that the individual wasn’t Sonny, but his family and was generally looking out for him. I think this short story was interpretive, because it gave us a view how life was Sonny and his family. The title of this book is Sonny’s Blues has a double meaning to it, because it shows us that Sonny is a sad individual, life was hard for. To summarize the story I’d say that in the beginning when the narrator remember life with sonny as kid. As the progress we learn that sonny was jail for awhile and then soon released and now living with his brother. We soon experience a flashback to the life that Sonny used to

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” conveys how music serves as a form of communication, both at a small and large scale. Charting the development of the communication between Sonny and his brother allows us to view how the unnamed brother fails to meet Sonny at his emotional level by not understanding his pain. I argue that the text introduces Sonny as someone who “has never been talkative” to set the foundation for his growth from being voiceless to speaking both vibrantly and effortlessly through music (Baldwin 113). Over the course of the text, the unnamed brother begins to listen to Sonny to discover the connection between music and emotion. Therefore, the text argues that music is a crucial mechanism to communicate with one another—more specifically

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.

"Sonny's Blues" opens with news that Sonny has been recently apprehended during a drug bust, which establishes that Sonny has had an ongoing problem with drug addiction, specifically heroin. While the narrator is apprehensive about contacting Sonny after this incident as the brother have lost touch over the years, he eventually reaches out to Sonny and gains insight into what Sonny has been doing during their estrangement; it is also during this time that the narrator recognizes that music is not only an artistic outlet for Sonny, but also provides an emotional and psychological catharsis for him and those that listen to his music. Sonny best describes his dependency on music as he talks to his brother after an old-fashioned revival meeting during which there was much singing. Sonny states,