“Sonny’s Blues” By James Baldwin

“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

In "Sonny's Blues", theme, form, and image blend into perfect harmony and rise to a thundering climax. The story, written in 1957 carries a vital social message for us today. It tells of two black brothers' struggle to understand one another. The older brother, a well-off Harlem algebra teacher, is the unnamed narrator. The younger man is Sonny, a jazz pianist who, when the story opens, has just been arrested for peddling and using heroin. In Sonny's Blues, chronological time is upset yet the author, Baldwin, allows everything to come together in the end. In "Sonny's Blues" the tragedy and suffering can be transformed into an art such as blues music. This can be viewed as a catalyst for change, as the narrator begins to understand not only the music, but also himself and his relationship with Sonny. (Reilly 65)

James Baldwin was born in 1924 in Harlem, New York to an unwed mother. His mother married David Baldwin, a strict preacher who never accepted James. The oldest of nine children, Baldwin grew up in extreme poverty. In his teens, he worked as a Pentecostal preacher, under the influence of his father. Yet as he grew older, he moved away from the influence of the church. He found himself an apartment in the artist's district of Greenwich Village, NY and then, in 1948, in part due to racial injustices and the alienation he felt as a gay black man in the US, he moved to Paris. He returned to the United States in 1957 and became a major part of the civil rights movement. When "Sonny's Blues" was published in the same year, Baldwin was already known on the literary scene. The story appeared in Partisan Review, one of America's most well-respected journals at the time. Baldwin published it again in 1965 in his collection of short stories entitled “Going to Meet the Man”. The story on its own garnered a plenty of positive critical attention, but critics had very different ideas about what the story was really about.  Baldwin had...