Theme of suffering in sonny's blues

Fiction Anthology Essay

Sonny’s Blues

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES BALDWIN

Baldwin was born in 1924 in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. He was raised by his mother and step-father, a Baptist minister who abused and ridiculed him. This abuse, as well as the persistent racism Baldwin experienced while growing up, had a deep influence on his writing. At 19, Baldwin began devoting himself seriously to writing, publishing essays and short stories whose success led him to move to Paris in 1948 on a fellowship. Baldwin would revisit Europe throughout his life, citing its importance in giving him perspective on his experiences in America and liberating him to write about controversial American themes. Though Baldwin is best known as a novelist and essayist, he was also a playwright, a poet, a critic, and a writer of short stories. Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, was a prolific voice of the civil rights movement due to the overriding concern in his stories and essays with racism in America. Openly gay, he was also known for his frank treatment of taboo subjects like homosexuality and interracial relationships. Widely considered to be one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, Baldwin’s influence lives on in writers like Toni Morrison and Joan Didion.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

“Sonny’s Blues” takes place in 1950s Harlem, a New York neighborhood known as the center of urban black life in America at the time. Between the 1920s and 1950s, African Americans began moving northward in what was called the Great Migration, a mass relocation in order to escape the Jim Crow South and seek economic opportunity. In the decades prior to “Sonny’s Blues,” Harlem transformed into an almost entirely African American neighborhood, and it was particularly known for the period of artistic prosperity in the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to its rich culture, Harlem was known to be a place of vice, poverty, and violence. This is reflected in “Sonny’s Blues”—for example, the notoriously poor housing conditions in Harlem led to the construction of many of the housing projects that Baldwin mentions in the story. Harlem was also a destination for jazz performers with its popular and storied venues, such as the Cotton Club, although by the 1950s many jazz venues had migrated downtown, as “Sonny’s Blues” suggests.

RELATED LITERARY WORKS

Many of James Baldwin’s other literary works deal with themes similar to those in “Sonny’s Blues,” particularly his semi- autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain. Richard

Wright, a friend of Baldwin’s, also wrote of the lives of young urban black men in the mid-twentieth century in Black BoyBlack Boy and NativNative Sone Son, and Ralph Ellison likewise did so in InInvisible Manvisible Man. Other writers who have incorporated meditations on African American music into their work include Ishmael Reed, Langston Hughes, Albert Murray, Jean Toomer, and even Jack Kerouac. Throughout his life, Baldwin frequently cited the importance of Henry James on his writing. James, another American writing abroad, shared Baldwin’s concern with people whose identity was at odds with the predominant culture around them.

KEY FACTS

• Full Title: Sonny’s Blues

• When Written: 1957

• Where Written: Paris

• When Published: 1957 originally, and then in the collection Going to Meet the Man in 1965

• Literary Period: 20th Century African American Literature

• Genre: Short Story

• Setting: Harlem, New York, USA

• Climax: The ending, in which the narrator listens to Sonny play at the jazz club

• Antagonist: Drugs, Racism

• Point of View: First person

EXTRA CREDIT

Preaching Potential. At age 14 Baldwin became a devoted member of a Pentecostal church, eventually becoming a wildly popular Junior Minister. While he lost his faith at 17, he viewed his time in the church as an important step in overcoming some of the difficulties of his personal life, like his abusive stepfather. Much of Baldwin’s work is inflected with Biblical imagery and allusion.

Activism and Fame. Baldwin was a nonviolent civil rights activist who wrote prolifically about racism in the United States, and who allied himself with civil rights organizations like the influential Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1963, Baldwin was on the cover of Time for his importance in bringing to life the experiences of African Americans living with racism, and his unique ability to illuminate the ideas of civil rights to white and black audiences alike.

INTRINTRODUCTIONODUCTION

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The story opens on the unnamed narrator, who has just read in the newspaper that his little brother Sonny was arrested for using and selling heroin. Throughout his day, he cannot think of anything else. He’s a high school algebra teacher, and he looks at his young students, wondering which ones are, like Sonny, turning to drugs to escape the suffering of their lives as young black men in Harlem.

The narrator runs into an old friend of Sonny’s—a drug user—on the way to the subway, and their conversation makes the narrator understand how hard prison will be for Sonny. Still, the narrator says he doesn’t plan to do anything to help Sonny, though he gives Sonny’s friend money when he asks.

The story jumps ahead to months later, when the narrator’s young daughter Grace has just died of polio and the narrator finally, in his grief, decides to write to Sonny in jail. Sonny replies that he needed to hear from his brother, but didn’t want to reach out first because he knows the pain he has caused. The two strike up a correspondence, and when Sonny is released from jail he comes to live with the narrator’s family in Harlem.

Having Sonny around seems to trigger the narrator’s memories of his childhood, and the story jumps back in time. The narrator recalls that right after his father died, his mother made him promise not to let anything happen to Sonny. The narrator didn’t understand her worry, so she told him about how his father had watched his brother (a musician, like Sonny) get run over by a car of drunk white men. The narrator’s mother reminds him that he has a brother too, and the world hasn’t changed.

When the narrator’s mother dies soon after, he gets a furlough from the army to attend the funeral. The narrator is married to a woman named Isabel, and he arranges for teenaged Sonny to go live with Isabel’s parents until he finishes school. During this visit he has a conversation in which Sonny reveals his desire to be a jazz musician, and the narrator discourages him harshly. Living with the narrator’s wife’s family, Sonny plays their piano day and night. Eventually, after the family learns he hasn’t been going to school, Sonny joins the navy and leaves without saying goodbye. The next time the narrator sees Sonny is after the war. Sonny is living downtown with a group of musicians. The narrator and Sonny have a horrible fight, and they don’t speak again until the narrator writes to Sonny in jail.

The story then returns to the present, when Sonny has been living with the narrator for two weeks. The narrator is home alone watching a revival meeting across the street, and he sees Sonny at the edge of the crowd listening to them sing. Sonny comes upstairs and invites the narrator to hear him play in the Village that night. The narrator agrees to come, and they discuss the woman singing across the street at the revival meeting. It triggers a conversation about the intensity of

suffering, and how drugs and music can be an escape from it, a way not to be shaken to pieces by the world. Sonny reminds the narrator that, while he is clean now, his troubles aren’t necessarily over, and the narrator silently promises to always be there for Sonny.

The two of them go to the nightclub, and the narrator is surprised by how admired and beloved Sonny is by everyone there—Sonny has his own world that the narrator doesn’t know anything about. Sonny and his band begin to play, and the narrator thinks about how rare it is to have an experience where music touches you. That leads him to reflect on how difficult it must be to play music, to have to impose order on all the rage and delight and confusion inside of people. Sonny seems to struggle at first to really put himself into the music, but eventually Sonny hits his stride and the narrator, listening from a corner, tears up thinking about suffering: his own, Sonny’s, their parents, and the suffering in the world around them. He realizes that music is telling everyone’s story, and that it’s a gift to strive to tell it anew in a way that will make an audience listen and make them confront their demons in a way that makes them feel less alone.

When the band pauses, the narrator buys Sonny a drink and the bartender puts the glass on top of his piano. Sonny sips it, meets eyes with the narrator, and returns to playing. The narrator watches the glass shake sitting on the piano above Sonny’s head, comparing it to “the very cup of trembling.”

MAJOR CHARACTERS

The NarrThe Narratorator – The first-person narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” is a high school math teacher in Harlem. As the story begins, he has to decide how to handle his brother Sonny’s trouble with addiction. The narrator is acutely aware of the drugs, violence, and lack of opportunity that pervade his neighborhood, and he has spent his whole life fighting to avoid meeting the fate of those around him. He has a good job, he’s married with children, and he seems devoted to living an orderly and upstanding life—a devotion that has paradoxically served to make him bitter and obsessed with the very suffering he’s trying to avoid. The narrator has a complex relationship to family. While he has crafted a traditional and loving family for himself, his relationship to his brother Sonny is fraught, and he feels guilty that he has watched Sonny suffer without intervening, as he promised his late mother that he would. Over the course of the story, as the narrator is forced to grapple more with the suffering of others, his relationship to Sonny improves and he becomes a warmer and more compassionate character.

SonnSonnyy – Sonny is the narrator’s brother. He’s a jazz musician and a heroin addict who lived a bohemian life in New York prior

PLPLOOT SUMMARYT SUMMARY

CHARACHARACTERSCTERS

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to being arrested for his drug abuse and sent to jail. Sonny is passionate, freethinking, and not particularly responsible. As his strained relationship to the narrator recovers over the course of the story, Sonny is able to stay off of drugs and begin to rebuild his life. While Baldwin does not maintain complete optimism about Sonny’s odds of beating his addiction, Sonny does manage to bring joy into the narrator’s family, and his music allows the narrator to begin to acknowledge his own suffering, a crucial development in mitigating the misery that the narrator feels about his regimented and fearful life.

The NarrThe Narrator’s Motherator’s Mother — The narrator’s mother is not alive in “Sonny’s Blues,” but the narrator remembers her at length in the middle of the story. She is described as a wise and caring woman who took on the problems and sorrows of her family; this is best shown when she tells the narrator about his father’s troubles, and admits that she was the only one he ever talked to about it. Significantly, the narrator’s mother also makes the narrator promise her that he will keep Sonny out of trouble and always be there for him. This shows her great insight into her sons and her deep caring for them; the promise ultimately helps not only Sonny, but also the narrator, because it keeps him from allowing his strained relationship with Sonny to persist and forces him to become more compassionate.

The NarrThe Narrator’s Fatherator’s Father — The narrator’s father is also not alive in “Sonny’s Blues,” but through the narrator’s memories of him and his mother’s stories about him, Baldwin gives a glimpse of who he was. The narrator’s father is described as someone who could be hopeful and caring, but was also plagued by despair—he drank on weekends, eventually drinking himself to death. Though the narrator never knew this while his father was alive, the source of the narrator’s father’s torment was having witnessed the death of his own brother when a car of drunk white men ran him over on purpose. The narrator’s father suffered deeply from this event, but kept his suffering private, preferring to handle it by drinking and only confessing his feelings to his wife.

The NarrThe Narrator’s Father’s Brotherator’s Father’s Brother — The narrator’s father’s brother only appears in “Sonny’s Blues” through the narrator’s memory of a story his mother told him, but nonetheless he is a consequential character because his death is at the center of much of their familial pain. The narrator’s mother describes the narrator’s uncle as a man somewhat similar to Sonny—he was a musician and enjoyed a reckless and bohemian social life. He died when, while walking home from a concert with the narrator’s father, a car of drunk racists ran him over. The death broke the narrator’s father’s heart, leading the narrator’s father to repress his sorrow, which set an example for the narrator to do the same.

IsabelIsabel — Isabel is the narrator’s wife. She is shown to be a kind and understanding person who is happy to take Sonny into their family, despite his troubles. Isabel’s great sorrow was witnessing the agonizing death of their daughter Grace, and

she often cries to the narrator about it at night or wakes up with nightmares. Despite having experienced the traumatic loss of a child, she and the narrator seem to have a kind and loving marriage.

The NarrThe Narrator’s Sonsator’s Sons — The narrator’s sons are most frequently invoked in the story to demonstrate the destructive potential of Harlem. The narrator worries constantly that these kind and good-natured boys will become corrupted by the drugs, violence, and rage of Harlem. Otherwise, nearly all that is conveyed about the boys is that they are welcoming to Sonny and they treat him well.

CreoleCreole — Creole is the leader of the band Sonny plays with at the jazz club. He is older than Sonny and the narrator, and clearly an experienced musician—the narrator realizes quickly when they start playing that Creole is in control of everything that is happening onstage. Creole is shown to be a compassionate guide to Sonny as he navigates his first performance after his time in jail. Sonny struggles to play at first, and it is Creole’s firm guidance and trust that finally pushes Sonny into playing his best.

Isabel’s PIsabel’s Parentsarents — All Baldwin tells us about Isabel’s parents is that they didn’t approve of the narrator marrying their daughter, and yet they took in teenaged, orphaned Sonny anyway for the narrator’s sake. It’s a kindness that’s not straightforward; while taking Sonny in is obviously generous, they don’t make him feel terribly welcome, which leads him to flee.

SonnSonny’s Fy’s Friendriend — Sonny’s friend is, like Sonny, an addict in Harlem. The narrator recognizes him because he’s always on the streets asking for money. At the beginning of the story, Sonny’s friend tracks down the narrator to tell him about Sonny’s arrest, and in the course of their conversation Sonny’s friend is able to elicit compassion from the narrator for Sonny’s plight, even though it doesn’t inspire him to reach out to Sonny in jail.

MINOR CHARACTERS

GrGraceace — Grace is the narrator’s youngest child who died of polio at the age of two. The grief that her death causes in the narrator is what makes him finally able to step outside of himself and consider Sonny’s suffering, leading him to repair their relationship.

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THEMESTHEMES

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CYCLES OF SUFFERING

The central concern of “Sonny’s Blues” is suffering: Baldwin emphasizes that suffering is universal, and that it is also cyclical—that suffering tends to lead

to more suffering. Baldwin demonstrates the effects of suffering on several different scales: he shows the way suffering affects an individual life, the way it affects a family throughout generations, and the way it affects a society overall.

The story—set in 1950s Harlem, a New York neighborhood that was then at the center of urban black life—is particularly concerned with the difficult lives that await young black men in America. This is shown through the narrator’s reflections on the sad futures that his high school students face (lives of drugs, violence, and rage at having “their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities”), as well as the narrator’s and Sonny’s difficulty leaving Harlem despite their desire to get out. Baldwin shows that suffering is a central component of the African American experience, and Harlem is portrayed as a trap—a place of violence and suffering that, because of the trauma and racism its residents experience, is nearly impossible to escape.

Throughout the course of the story, Baldwin also reveals the parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of the narrator’s family, which emphasizes the echoes between the sufferings of previous generations and the suffering of the present. For instance, the narrator’s father’s despair over having watched his brother die mirrors the narrator’s own guilt and sadness about his failure to help Sonny with his addiction. Baldwin is not optimistic, either, about the next generation—the narrator, despite his becoming a schoolteacher, has not been able to provide better opportunities for his own children. They live in a rundown housing project and his daughter died an agonizing death of polio. He worries that his sons, like Sonny, will fall into the drugs that are everywhere on the streets of their neighborhood. This suggests that suffering is passed down generationally.

“Sonny’s Blues” also explores the ways that individual suffering ruins lives, particularly due to people’s reticence or inability to talk about their suffering. Baldwin shows how private suffering turns people bitter, estranges relationships, and even leads people to illness, addiction, or death. This is revealed most poignantly through the narrator who, at first glance, seems to be living a better life than Sonny. As the story progresses, however, we begin to understand the magnitude of the narrator’s anger, bitterness, and fear—he seems obsessed with avoiding the suffering that has plagued his family and community, but that obsession has effectively meant that he is fixated on suffering in a way that makes him miserable. While Sonny is more able to speak of his suffering than the narrator, he too seems to have been overwhelmed by suffering, which led him to addiction (itself a microcosm of self-perpetuating suffering), legal trouble, and temporary estrangement from his

brother.

Baldwin does not promise an easy escape to such overwhelming suffering, but he does give hints that the burden of these cycles of suffering can be lessened. The narrator’s epiphany at the jazz club shows the importance of expressing suffering in order to take control of it, and Sonny’s friendships with musicians show how creating community can bring relief.

FAMILY BONDS

In “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin asks how much family members owe to one another, and he examines the fallout when familial compassion fails and

obligations are only halfheartedly met. The most explicit example of this is the narrator’s failure for most of the story to live up to his promise to his mother that he would always be there for Sonny. Another example of a halfheartedly met family obligation is when the narrator’s wife’s family takes orphaned Sonny in, but makes it clear that they only did so because it was proper, not because they had compassion for Sonny’s predicament. Both of these instances of familial indifference compounded Sonny’s problems and fueled his despair, showing the power of family to grievously harm.

However, while familial cruelty or indifference propels the plot of “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin resolves the story by exploring how much more complex a family obligation is than it can initially appear. He suggests that family obligations, when met with real compassion, are mutually rewarding. The possibilities of a family relationship built on compassion emerge most clearly through the narrator’s growth once Sonny moves in with his family. At first, the narrator believes that he has been asked to care for Sonny because he is the more stable brother—he thinks that he has something to give Sonny, but nothing to gain by helping him. As the story progresses, however, and the narrator becomes open to understanding and accepting who Sonny is, the narrator begins to absolve himself of the guilt of having failed both his brother and mother. Also, more importantly, it becomes clear that Sonny’s music is an antidote to the bitterness and hopelessness that the narrator feels. Sonny and the narrator need one another—Sonny needs compassion and a place to stay, while the narrator needs a model of somebody who is striving for joy in spite of the suffering all around them. Their bond, then, is mutually beneficial.

It’s possible to see this complexity, too, in the narrator’s promise to his mother, a promise she forced him to make. The narrator’s mother sees this promise as a corrective to the previous generation’s tragedy, in which the narrator’s father failed to protect his own brother from a senseless and violent death. The narrator’s mother was the only person who saw the extent of her husband’s suffering afterwards, and, while the promise appears at first to be for Sonny’s benefit, it could also be seen as the mother’s attempt to spare the narrator a grief

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similar to his father’s. Overall, the story suggests that, while it is tempting to view family relationships and obligations as straightforward and even transactional, showing real compassion for family can offer surprising rewards, including the relief of a person’s most intractable suffering.

PASSION, RESTRAINT, AND CONTROL

The narrator and Sonny, as black men in America, live in a world that tries to control them. They also live in a world that seems completely overwhelming

because it is so saturated with suffering. Baldwin sets up the two brothers as being emblematic of two diverging responses to this pervasive suffering. One chooses a life of passion, idolizing artistic expression and casting aside a traditional life in order to find meaning, and the other is scrupulous about being responsible and living an orderly life. Both of these lifestyles are, in essence, an attempt to control the suffering they face. Baldwin does not propose that one of these modes of living is better than the other—each is shown to have severe drawbacks—nor does he suggest that suffering can ever be fully controlled, but he does show that the brothers can help one another by sharing the strengths that each mode of coping with suffering provides.

The narrator, who is the older of the brothers, is shown as living a life devoted to responsibility and rational decision making. He joins the army, gets married, has a family, works as a high school math teacher, and is all the while in a simmering rage that his choices have not led him to a better life than the one he grew up with, and that his sacrifices will not provide better opportunities for his children than the ones he had. Baldwin shows that, paradoxically, the narrator’s obsession with choosing a path that would lead him away from suffering has actually caused him to suffer because he has not prioritized finding joy or meaning in his life.

Sonny, the younger brother, has known since he was little that he loved music, and he decides to make a life of it because, as far as he is concerned, “people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?” Sonny’s pursuit of music leads him to not graduate from high school and to keep the company of people who lead him to drug use, which derails his life and lands him in prison. While Sonny is certainly the brother whose life seems, on the surface, more dominated by suffering (addiction, jail, having nowhere to go), he also is able to channel that suffering into something beautiful through his music.

Since suffering has led both brothers to lives that are, in some way, incomplete or unsustainable, Baldwin shows that they need one another. Sonny’s devotion to his passion means that he relies on the fruits of the narrator’s restraint—his home, family, and money—in order to start rebuilding his life. The narrator, though, also needs to be close to Sonny’s passion in order to bring joy and relief into his life that has been, so far, consumed by rage and bitterness. At the end of the story,

Baldwin gives readers a glimpse of how the blending of their lifestyles gives them new ways to see the control they crave. Music, the narrator begins to understand, is a way to impose order and even beauty on emotions that are dark and often incomprehensible. To listen to Sonny’s music liberates the narrator from his excruciating need to control all of the darkness in his world by suppressing his emotions. Music helps him understand that his feelings about suffering, while terrible, can also be an opportunity to access community and compassion.

SALVATION AND RELIEF

Each of the characters in “Sonny’s Blues” is living a life that is, in some way, governed by suffering, but it is the significant instances of salvation and relief

that prevent “Sonny’s Blues” from being utterly hopeless and tragic. Salvation and relief come in many forms in the story, some better than others, but it is the final invocation of the “cup of trembling” (a quote from the Biblical Book of Isaiah) that suggests a relief from suffering that might endure.

Sonny’s drug use is one way of finding relief from suffering. He describes the feeling of heroin as something that makes him feel “distant” and “in control,” the latter being a feeling that “you’ve got to have” sometimes. Sonny, then, has turned to drugs in order to escape the feeling that the suffering in his life is not within his control. His drug use, of course, ultimately compounds his suffering instead of allowing him to escape it.

Sonny’s music is a more complex example of relief from suffering. While the narrator initially considers music to be a way for Sonny to shirk his responsibilities, he ultimately realizes that Sonny’s music fuels his life; it’s a way for him to make his suffering meaningful, and without it he would likely succumb to despair. In the passage in which the narrator listens to Sonny play at the bar, Baldwin makes clear that Sonny’s music is never separate from his suffering; playing piano is not an instance of pure joy in a horrible world, but rather an art that allows Sonny to make sense of suffering and turn it into something beautiful. This then lets him communicate with others and make people feel less alone. While listening to Sonny, the narrator realizes that music has the power to “help us to be free,” in his case because it helps him, for the first time, acknowledge his own sadness.

The final sentence of “Sonny’s Blues” describes a glass of milk and scotch that the narrator has given his brother. Baldwin writes, “it glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling.” This references a Bible passage that describes God taking suffering away from humanity: “I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling…; thou shalt no more drink it again.” The story’s ending is ambiguous, but it certainly suggests that Sonny’s music has taken suffering—at least temporarily—from both Sonny and the narrator. This is a complicated image, because it is both optimistic and

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precarious—the cup, like the relief it symbolizes, seems like it might be about to topple. The story has painted a detailed and explicit picture of the magnitude of suffering in Harlem, and Baldwin isn’t asking the reader to accept that music will cure it. However, this final moment suggests a way forward; music can take suffering and make it meaningful. In other words, it can’t cure suffering, but it can make the burdens of suffering easier to bear.

Symbols appear in teal text throughout the Summary and Analysis sections of this LitChart.

THE CUP OF TREMBLING At the end of the story the narrator has had an epiphany due to Sonny’s music, and Baldwin

introduces a symbol—“the cup of trembling”—to encapsulate the moment. This image is about salvation, and it comes from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible: the Lord says, “Behold, I have taken out of thine handthe cup of trembling, even the dregs ofthe cupof my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again.” In a story that is so concerned with suffering, the cup of trembling signifies a moment in which God took suffering away, much like music has decreased Sonny’s and the narrator’s sufferings. Though the symbol seems to appear out of nowhere, there are echoes of it throughout the story: for instance, Baldwin consistently describes people who have succumbed to the dangers of Harlem as “shaken to pieces.” It’s the trembling of rage, addiction, and despair that this cup takes away, and Baldwin’s use of the symbol is therefore clearly optimistic, but not wholeheartedly so. The cup is described as shaking above Sonny’s head, which seems a precarious and threatening position—it’s as though the whole endeavor could collapse and harm him, much like he could relapse into his old lifestyle of drug use. The future is uncertain for these characters, but the cup of trembling confirms that, through music, they’ve both found a way to relieve themselves, at least for a moment, from the suffering in which they’re immersed.

DARKNESS Throughout the story, Baldwin uses imagery of darkness to signal the dangers and traumas of

growing up black in Harlem. This begins early on; in the first paragraph, when the narrator is reeling from the news of Sonny’s arrest, his face is “trapped in the darkness which roared outside.” From then on, Baldwin’s mentions of darkness are always significant—they come at times of fear, despair, and hopelessness. Important instances of Baldwin dwelling on darkness include the narrator’s meditation on the futures of his

algebra students (“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…”), the darkness of the night in which the narrator’s father’s brother was killed, and the darkness that surrounds the living room in the narrator’s memory of being a child in a room of adult conversation. In both of these instances, darkness is a menace. Baldwin also (less frequently) uses light to symbolize the opposite of darkness. In moments of optimism, Baldwin will describe light on people’s faces, and at the jazz club the narrator observes that music is “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.” The opposition of light and dark is, of course, Biblical—there’s the pervasive danger of falling into evil and despair, but also the insistent hope of salvation, symbolized by the light.

Note: all page numbers for the quotes below refer to the Penguin Books edition of Sonny’s Blues and Other Stories published in 1995.

Sonny’s Blues Quotes

These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Sonny

Related Themes:

Page Number: 2

Explanation and Analysis

In this quote, the narrator has just learned that his brother Sonny has been arrested for using and selling heroin. Here, the narrator is sadly contemplating the similarities between the lives of his high school algebra students and his and Sonny’s childhood. By drawing this parallel, the narrator is showing that the same social conditions force each generation into lives of suffering. This is an indictment of the consequences of racism, which limits the possibilities of African Americans, and it is also an indication that there hasn’t been much improvement over time (“Sonny’s Blues” was published in 1957, when the civil rights movement was in its infancy). The narrator’s outlook is one of doom—everyone experiences the same hardship, many (like Sonny) are consumed by their suffering, and there’s no cause to hope for the future either. While the narrator is still not empathetic towards Sonny’s plight, his ability to see

SYMBOLSSYMBOLS

QUOQUOTESTES

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that Sonny’s trouble with drugs has to do with the hardships he has faced is, at least, a step towards understanding him. This is an early example of near-empathy from a generally un-empathetic character.

I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark,

quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)

Related Themes:

Page Number: 7

Explanation and Analysis

After hearing Sonny’s friend’s admission of guilt over having once told Sonny how good heroin felt, the narrator sees the world as being filled with menace. This seems to be due to the fact that the friend’s comment is doubly painful to hear: it stokes the narrator’s own guilt about not having helped Sonny, and it reminds him of the pervasiveness of the drugs that he hates. It’s significant that the narrator’s strategy for coping with difficult things is to not want to hear about them or engage with them. His life is built on a commitment to keeping suffering at bay through order and righteousness, so any attempt to reckon with a reality that he doesn’t like makes him feel threatened. This is also a moment in which the narrator could exercise empathy; he and Sonny’s friend share a sense of guilt about Sonny’s fate that could allow them to connect, but the narrator does not allow for this, instead deflecting his feelings into general observations of gloom. Over the course of the story, this attitude will be challenged and, eventually, overcome.

I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up

there, outside. I got to get outside.

Related Characters: Sonny (speaker)

Related Themes:

Related Symbols:

Page Number: 10

Explanation and Analysis

This quote appears in the first letter that Sonny writes to the narrator from prison. In it, he describes his awful suffering, which makes the narrator feel guilty that he didn’t reach out to his brother sooner. The image of the hole that Sonny sees himself climbing out of evokes the difficulty of overcoming addiction—once in the thralls of a drug habit, it’s very hard to break the cycle and return to normalcy (or, metaphorically, climb out of the hole). However, Sonny’s assertion that he finally sees the sunshine and wants to get out of the hole suggests that he does see a pathway to a better life. The language Sonny uses to talk about this also echoes Baldwin’s overarching use of darkness to symbolize suffering and light to symbolize the possibility of salvation. Here, salvation (recovery from drug addiction) is uncertain—it’s on the horizon, but there’s not a clear path to it. In reading this letter, the narrator realizes that Sonny needs his help, and that he could make the difference between Sonny staying in the hole and getting out.

When I saw him many things I thought I had forgotten came flooding back to me. This was because I had begun,

finally, to wonder about Sonny, about the life that Sonny lived inside.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Sonny

Related Themes:

Page Number: 11

Explanation and Analysis

In this passage, the narrator has just picked Sonny up from prison and is seeing him for the first time in many years. As we saw in the narrator’s encounter with Sonny’s friend, the narrator tends to lack curiosity about experiences that don’t fit with his ordered and respectable life. This tendency to shut out unpleasantness has made the narrator un- empathetic, because it precludes him from wanting to understand Sonny’s (or anybody else’s) troubles. In this moment, however, the narrator has finally begun to feel some curiosity about Sonny that will eventually morph into empathy. It’s significant that, upon feeling this curiosity, memories of the narrator’s that he hasn’t thought of in years are unlocked. This hints at the personal toll that the narrator’s rigidity and guardedness have taken on him. Though he sees his orderly life as protecting him from the suffering around him, it has also prevented him from

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grappling with the suffering—particularly in the form of painful memories—that he carries within himself.

Boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into

the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t. Those who got out always left something of themselves behind.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Sonny

Related Themes:

Related Symbols:

Page Number: 13

Explanation and Analysis

This passage occurs when the narrator has picked up Sonny from jail and they are in a taxi driving through Harlem, the neighborhood where they grew up. Sonny hasn’t been back to Harlem in years, and, as a result, the narrator is seeing his home anew—and not favorably. Here, the narrator remembers how problems at home led him and Sonny to the streets, where even worse problems awaited them: in other words, suffering led to greater suffering. The gloom of this is compounded by the narrator drawing a parallel between his generation and the new generation. Things haven’t improved for young black men, as the same sufferings that led to Sonny’s current condition are still overtaking Harlem’s youth.

While the narrator and Sonny have, in their own ways, escaped Harlem (Sonny doesn’t live there anymore, and the narrator has a respectable job that has spared him the fate of many of Harlem’s residents), the narrator reflects that even those who got away—presumably like himself and Sonny—are still, in some way, trapped in Harlem. This alludes to the extent to which Sonny and the narrator’s childhoods still haunt them and, perhaps, always will.

The moment Sonny and I started into the house I had the feeling that I was simply bringing him back into the danger

he had almost died trying to escape.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), Sonny

Related Themes:

Page Number: 14

Explanation and Analysis

The house they’re entering is one of the housing projects that the narrator has just described in near-apocalyptic terms (“like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea”). The housing project is run-down and full of all the suffering and vice (including drugs) that led Sonny astray as a young man. While the narrator sees himself as someone whose commitment to hard work and respectability has allowed him to escape suffering, he realizes in this passage that, despite the life he has lived and the commitments he has made, he can’t provide a safe place for his children and his brother to live, and that makes him feel guilty. The narrator, despite all of his sacrifices, is still up against the same problems as always (Sonny is still an addict living in a place where drugs are readily available), and this emphasizes the tendency of suffering to replicate itself. It also illuminates the logic of the narrator’s pessimism; he doesn’t have much reason to hope that things will turn out better for Sonny this time.

You can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes and you hear the street noises every now

and again, or maybe the jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by, but it’s real quiet in the room. For a moment nobody’s talking, but every face looks darkening, like the sky outside…Everyone is looking at something a child can’t see.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)

Related Themes:

Related Symbols:

Page Number: 17

Explanation and Analysis

In this passage, the narrator takes the story back in time through a series of recollections. At this moment he is generally recalling the state of being a child in a room full of adults as dusk is closing in. This is his memory, but also one that stands in for all the children of Harlem. While there is no explicit menace mentioned in this passage, Baldwin’s focus on darkness signals to the reader that he is invoking suffering or fear; his observation that “every face looks darkening” indicates that, though the child doesn’t understand, all the adults are thinking about the sufferings

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they have endured. The imagery, too, of the darkness “growing against the windowpanes” shows the fragility of the home as a bulwark against despair. While the darkness is thickest out on the street, that darkness has permeated the room, too, in the form of the shadows crossing everyone’s faces. This passage shows that, despite the child’s innocence and inability to understand the specifics of the adults’ memories, the child is still raised in an environment permeated by darkness. Suffering is a baseline condition—one so pervasive that it becomes the atmosphere of the room. Baldwin is suggesting here that nobody can grow up in that environment and be unaffected by the suffering around them.

The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frightens the child obscurely….The darkness outside

is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk anymore because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)

Related Themes:

Related Symbols:

Page Number: 17-18

Explanation and Analysis

This passage is also part of the narrator’s reverie about being the lone child in a room full of adults in Harlem, but this passage focuses more specifically on the effects of silence. The darkness, which symbolizes suffering, is frightening to the child, but even more so because of the silence with which it is greeted. The child understands enough to know that the adults won’t talk about suffering around him because that will give him something specific to fear, but the silence actually increases his fear because it means that he has the liberty to imagine the terrors that might await him. This poisonous effect of silence is echoed throughout the story—in the narrator’s long silence with Sonny, for example, or in his father’s silence about his brother who died. Both of these silences, like the silence described in this quote, are meant to be protective of the self or of a family member, but each of them does more harm than good (the narrator’s silence hurts Sonny and himself, and the father’s silence makes him suffer privately

and prevents the family from understanding the mood of their house). This passage suggests the importance of open communication in families—communication, compassion, and empathy are central to the family bond, and even to the prevention of future suffering.

“He says he never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away.”

Related Characters: The Narrator’s Mother (speaker), The Narrator’s Father’s Brother, The Narrator’s Father

Related Themes:

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Page Number: 21

Explanation and Analysis

In this quote, the narrator’s mother is telling the story of how the narrator’s father’s brother died on a dark road when a car of drunk white racists ran him over. This was a turning point in the narrator’s father’s life—his guilt and despair over having watched his brother die led him to a life of drinking and suffering privately. This is one of the most concrete uses of darkness as a symbol for suffering. While the narrator’s mother has told us that the road was not literally totally dark (there was a bright moon that night), the narrator’s father’s statement that he had never seen anything as dark as that road shows that what he actually meant is that this was the beginning of his greatest suffering. This passage is meant to echo the relationship between the narrator and Sonny, showing the guilt and sorrow that arises when one brother fails another.

“I ain’t telling you all this,” she said, “to make you scared or bitter or to make you hate nobody. I’m telling you this

because you got a brother. And the world ain’t changed.”

Related Characters: The Narrator’s Mother (speaker), Sonny, The Narrator

Related Themes:

Page Number: 21

Explanation and Analysis

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This passage comes just after the narrator’s mother has finished telling the story of the narrator’s father’s brother’s death. Here, she makes explicit that she told the story not simply to illuminate the private suffering that structured the narrator’s father’s life, but also as an instructive tale for the narrator, whose own little brother (Sonny) might someday need to be protected. Her cautions to the narrator—that she’s not telling this to make him scared, bitter, or hateful—show her wisdom and understanding of her son’s nature. Indeed, the narrator’s personality—his fixation on suffering and his bitterness in the face of the hardship around him—meant that this was precisely how he did react to this story. Learning of his family’s suffering strengthened his conviction that he should shut suffering out. His reaction to the story ends up clouding his ability to understand Sonny’s desire to be a musician, because the narrator is so scared that music will lead to Sonny suffering.

“You got to hold on to your brother,” she said, “and don’t let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him

and no matter how evil you gets with him. You going to be evil with him many a time. But don’t you forget what I told you, you hear?…You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there.”

Related Characters: The Narrator’s Mother (speaker), Sonny, The Narrator

Related Themes:

Page Number: 22

Explanation and Analysis

This quote is how the narrator’s mother ends her telling of the story of the narrator’s father’s brother’s death—by requiring the narrator to promise to protect and be there for Sonny no matter how badly the narrator might treat Sonny and no matter what happens in Sonny’s life. It’s a sweeping promise that the narrator does make, and its wisdom becomes apparent as the story progresses. The narrator’s mother anticipates Sonny’s troubles, the narrator’s initial reaction to them, and, more subtly, that her promise might (by forcing the narrator to continue his relationship with Sonny) spare him from the bitterness and sorrow that afflicted her husband. In other words, this promise appears to be for the benefit of Sonny, but it ultimately benefits the narrator just as much because it requires him to repair their relationship, which soothes his guilt and gives him tools—Sonny’s music—to confront and

assuage his own suffering.