The passage that I chose to write about is from “Sonny’s Blues.” It is line 165, the narrator says, “Sonny, you hear me?” Sonny responds, “I hear you, but you never hear me.” This line is a big part of the whole story. The narrator has never understood his brother. He doesn’t listen to his brother because he seems to be so woried about watching over him. The narrator doesn’t understand why music is so important to Sonny. The whole discussion leading up to these lines is more examples of the narrator not listening to Sonny. The narrator was told to watch over his brother, but he took these instructions and tried to control Sonny. At the end of the story, Sonny is finally heard. The narrator goes to a club and listens to Sonny. He then finally understands what is so important to Sonny and why his like is so much about his music. -Laura Harding
This passage between our narrator and a former friend of Sonny is interesting to me. It causes me to wonder if by talking to this man that it helps the narrator to feel less guilty about not being there for Sonny. Mainly the part where he gives the guy five dollars. I think by helping someone Sonny was associated with that it makes the narrator feel less guilty about breaking his promise to his mother. Ialso think that by asking the other man,”What the hell can I do anyway”. By asking him this he might be looking foe reassurance that there is nothing he can do. If I am way offbase please write back and tell me. -Bryan Hanvey
Lines 105-110 in Sonny’s Blues. “Everyone is looking at something a child cn’t see. For a minute they’ve forgotton the children….The silence, the darkness is coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the child obscurely. He hopes that the hand which strokes his forehead will never stop- will never die.” On the surface, this quote is talking about how it is getting late in the day and the sun is going down and darkness is falling on a lazy, peaceful, Sunday afternoon. To the children, everything is perfect. There is hidden meaning in this. What the narrator is really talking about is his own life and the life of his brother Sonny. As children, they were happy and didn’t have a care in the world. They were not aware of all of the bad things, or “darkness” that would happen to them in the future. All children are innocent and are never prepared for the trials and disappointments of adulthood. -Leigha Bergstrand
Although deep water and drowning are sometimes related, they are not the same thing. “Deep water” is/are challenges that face us all. They can face us in the classroom, the workplace, the weightroom, or on the playing field. The challenges present themselves, and the question is, “Are you going to sink or swim?” (”Are you up to the challenge at hand?”). Drowning occurs when one is unable to survive the deep water. One can also drown by refusing to accept the challenge. A great feeling occurs when one accepts a challenge and then defeats it. An even greater feeling can be felt when one not only accepts a challenge, but also goes on to excel past the limit of expectations. I had these feelings after my father passed away during spring break last semester. The question was, “Are you going to allow this tragedy ruin your education opportunity?” I was able to look defeat right into its eyes and say, “I’m too mentally strong to allow this misfortune to be any form of an excuse. I must carry on, as if were by my side, and make him proud.” I hope I did. My GPA was a 3.4. -Peter Slavish
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
Themes of personal importance include the significance of community identification, the communion achieved in “Sonny’s Blues,” for example; the conflicted feelings following success when that requires departure from the home community; the power of love to bridge difference. The chief historical issue centers on the experience of urbanization following migration from an agricultural society. The philosophical issue concerns Baldwin’s use of religious imagery and outlook, his interest in redemption and the freeing of spirit. Interestingly, this philosophical/religious issue is often conveyed in the secular terms of blues, but transcendence remains the point.
Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions
Baldwin’s frequent use of the first-person narration and the personal essay naturally associates his writing with autobiography. His fiction should be discussed in relation to the traditions of African-American autobiography which, since the fugitive slave narratives, has presented a theme of liberation from external bondage and a freeing of subjectivity to express itself in writing. As for period, his writing should be looked at as a successor to polemical protest; thus, it is temporally founded in the 1950s and 1960s.
Original Audience
In class I ask students to search out signs that the narrative was written for one audience or the other: What knowledge is expected of the reader? What past experiences are shared by assumption? Incidentally, this makes an interesting way to overcome the resistance to the material. Without being much aware that they are experiencing African-American culture, most Americans like the style and sound of blues and jazz, share some of the ways of dress associated with those arts and their audiences, and know the speech patterns.
In James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues he deals with a man trying to find his identity in a very hostile society. The blues in this story is used in a more emotional manner which recollects the past. It also repairs the relationship between the two brothers who have chosen two different ways of coping in their ghetto environment. The blues also serves as a communication devise between the two brothers. Baldwin uses the blues to state a fact; the ugliness and meanness inherent in the human condition. In order to really understand the message of the blues you have to be one that has suffered just like Sonny and the elder brother. The blues that they play also communicates to other sufferers who have had their own trials, so they know what this music is all about. Sonny’s suffering are within himself, but deep suffering is common to all his listeners. Even his brother can attune himself to this suffering, which is brought on by the death of his little daughter Grace. When the brother is at the club listening to the blues he recalls his mother, the moonlit road on which his uncle died, and his wife’s tears and he responds deeply to the music and is able to find himself through his own suffering. The blues move farther than just being simply a lament. The brother reveals that, “the song is no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”( ) This discovery reiterates Creole’s earlier assessment of the blues: “There isn’t any other tale to tell, its the only light we’ve got in all the darkness.” Here the blues provides for the player and listener a temporary flight away from the despair of their daily condition. The blues that they are playing touches the heart without words.