The Theme Of Dark And Darkness In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

In James Baldwin’s short story, Sonny’s Blues, he describes a story of pain and prejudice. The theme of suffering makes the readers relate to it. The story is told in the realistic point of view of Sonny’s brother. The setting and time of the story also has great significance to the story. From beginning to end, the story is well developed.

Everyone likes to feel safe. We try to protect ourselves and those we love, to make them feel safe as well. The idea conveyed about safety in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is that there is no such thing.

In James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues” there is a constant contrast between light and dark. Baldwin uses this theme to highlight the struggles that the Narrator and his younger brother, Sonny, both face. Light represents all of the positive aspects of life. Meanwhile, the darkness represents the constant struggle that threatens the characters in the story. Light and dark has a presence in both characters. The narrator lives his life in the “light”. He is a teacher, middleclass man, a man who has a wife and family. For the narrator, the darkness is his constant reflections on his brother, and his sense of guilt or blame for being the reason why Sonny turned to a life of drugs. The darkness represents Sonny in a way. He is a

(Teaching Arts) One of Baldwin’s beliefs was that art and music has the power to minimize suffering. Sonny uses bebop to express his emotions on his up-bringing and where he came from. The narrator, Sonny’s brother, and Sonny grew up in the projects of Harlem and were exposed to drugs and alcohol. They both feel darkness in their lives. Sonny became addicted to heroin and went to jail. Once out of jail, Sonny uses bebop music to make sense of his emotions instead of the heroin. Sonny’s brother does not understand his passion for music but does not know how to express his feelings of being “trapped in the darkness which roared outside.”(Baldwin 84) When Sonny was a teenager, he tells his brother he wants to be a jazz musician. The narrator does not think it is good enough for him because jazz was new and was not yet understood.

Racism is a big issue in today’s world. It has become something that cause violence and conflict. The aggressive nature of racism is consuming the equal rights for what humanity is supposed to be. It is a problem that an extensive amount of people are dealing with all over the world. Racial bias has been around for quite sometime now, and it only seems to be progressing into something that one simply cannot comprehend. In the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” the author, James Baldwin, emphasizes on the lasting effect of racism throughout the story. Baldwin vaguely expresses the impact of racial bias on the character Sonny. The audience has to infer the reasoning behind what the author is trying to convey. In the story, racism is a significant

For example, in John Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” one can see how the two characters were taking drastically different paths but grew up in the same Harlem ghetto. The Harlem environment was stultifying. This was evident when Baldwin described Harlem as the “…lifeless elegance of hotels and apartments buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood” (54). Baldwin described Harlem as streets that killed our childhood which spoke volume to the issue of how the surroundings affect the youth in that area. They were raised in a dead end neighborhood which led to many of their dead end lifestyles like Sonny’s. Michael Clark, author of "James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues: Childhood, Light and Art”, states that Harlem was a place where children had often been “smothered” (Clark 24) saying that some even escaped this deplorable surrounding though some just could not. John M. Reilly, author of “Sonny's Blues: James Baldwin's Image of Black Community”, stated that “…in the story…the two men have chosen different ways to cope with the menacing ghetto environment” (2). For the narrator he dealt with his issues by becoming a math teacher and working to bring the kids out of the dead end environment that Harlem had presented. While on the other hand, Sonny coped with his pain through music and unfortunately drugs. This clash did

Lightness and darkness is a common theme throughout literature, most writers use it through symbols in their writing. In Poe’s story “Masque of the Red Death” and Hawthorne’s story “Minister’s Black Veil” both portray themes of lightness and darkness using symbolism throughout.

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" the symbolic motif of light and darkness illustrates the painful nature of reality the two characters face as well as the power gained through it. The darkness represents the actuality of life on the streets of the community of Harlem, where there is little escape from the reality of drugs and crime. The persistent nature of the streets lures adolescents to use drugs as a means of escaping the darkness of their lives. The main character, Sonny, a struggling jazz musician, finds himself addicted to heroin as a way of unleashing the creativity and artistic ability that lies within him. While using music as a way of creating a sort of structure in his life, Sonny attempts to step into the light, a life

While reading “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin theme, symbolism, and motifs were discovered throughout the entire short story. Sonny one of the two main characters, is dealing with a drug addiction and is now following his dreams of becoming a jazz musician. The narrator, whose name was never given, does his best to keep the promise he made his mother years ago, to be his brother’s keeper.

The interplay of dark and light motifs underlies the narrator’s most recent hardship. On his way home on the subway, the narrator comes across his brother’s name in a newspaper and “stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin). Riding in the light of the subway car, the author makes the non-suspecting narrator subject to suffering, unguarded by the protective cloak of the outside darkness. Made vulnerable by the exposed light and people surrounding him, the narrator is hit harder by the unexpected news than if he had read it in the darkness of his private room. Under the “swinging lights,” the narrator is not prepared to cope with the troubling news. This emphasizes the importance of light as a symbol for one’s need of camouflage to properly cope with tragedy.

Fictional writing is generally done just to entertain readers. Some authors create stories with a singular point of view, while others introduce more complex plots and storylines. When it comes to author James Baldwin’s short story Sonny’s Blues, there is much depth given to the storyline and the characters. Sonny’s Blues has been analyzed by many different people throughout time because the story has many elements. From Baldwin’s skillful use of metaphors and similes to his incorporation of religious references, this story is insightfully and complexly written. A simple story about a man and his brother leaves readers with an inside look into family, drug addiction, socioeconomic struggles in the Black community, and the language of Jazz

In "Sonny's Blues" James Baldwin presents an intergenerational portrait of suffering and survival within the sphere of black community and family. The family dynamic in this story strongly impacts how characters respond to their own pain and that of their family members. Examining the central characters, Mama, the older brother, and Sonny, reveals that each assumes or acknowledges another's burden and pain in order to accept his or her own situation within an oppressive society. Through this sharing each character is able to achieve a more profound understanding of his own suffering and attain a sharper, if more precarious, notion of survival.

In this instance light seems to be simply the good within a young Sonny. His brother is quickly reminded however that just as Sonny's face was once light there were shadows too. Recalling this younger Sonny forces the narrator to think of the other young boys he teaches. He connects the darkness that Sonny faced with the darkness and reality those other young boys live with, "All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone," (410). Here Baldwin gives us our first sense of the pervasive nature of darkness. It is engulfing the boys without their realizing it, darkness is the wasted chances or lack of opportunity at all. The movies show the youths a fairy tale of what could be but will never happen. This darkness of what could have been keeps the young boys from attempting anything. They are together in this sentence of fate but they are also painfully alone, because nothing will ever come of them. The young boys of Harlem live in a dark reality; they do not know light and therefore cannot know hope. The narrator begins to understand that there is no way out of the darkness for them and no escape from the reality of drugs and crime that surrounds them.

In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” one of the most pertinent themes throughout the story is the contrast and duality of light and darkness. More specifically, the author explores this theme by using light and darkness to explain the characters coming to terms with their realities and the realities of many people who live in their community. The theme also is key in explaining the relationship between Sonny and the narrator. In this paper, I intend to explain the significance of the tension of identifying one’s reality in “Sonny’s Blues,” by exploring the many instances that Baldwin uses light and darkness to explore one’s reality.

At first glance, "Sonny's Blues" seems ambiguous about the relationship between music and drugs. After all, the worlds of jazz and drug addiction are historically intertwined; it could be possible that Sonny's passion for jazz is merely an excuse for his lifestyle and addiction, as the narrator believes for a time. Or perhaps the world that Sonny has entered by becoming involved in jazz is the danger- if he had not encountered jazz he wouldn't have encountered drugs either. But the clues given by the portrayals of music and what it does for other figures in the story demonstrate music's beneficial nature; music and drugs are not interdependent for Sonny. By studying the