James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is the story about the clash of sensibilities between two brothers. The unnamed narrator is an algebra teacher, and he is a man who has survived his Harlem upbringing and seeks out a normal life with traditional middle-class values in America. His brother, Sonny, has become a jazz piano player and also a drug user.
The two brothers are clearly very different, yet they have a blood tie and the story explores how the two of them reconcile (or try to reconcile) their differences. In dealing with the story, it would be good to start with a focus on the symbolism of ice and water throughout the story.
When the narrator finds out that Sonny has been picked up in a raid for peddling and using heroin, he becomes extremely tense. "A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my algebra classes" (Baldwin 613). Here ice symbolizes the "freezing" up of emotions, leaving an immobility and paralysis in the narrator. There is also the feeling of cold: he is number and his sense of being frozen up and cut off is acute.
The narrator also says that the ice is melting slowly: here he equates the warmth that begins to take over once again in his stomach as something good and human.
An interesting analogy can be seen in the next sentence of the story: "It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less (Baldwin 613). Here the narrator describes his feeling of anxiety of ice water in his veins. The substance that has been going "all up and down" his brother's veins has been heroin. So: both brothers are affected by the flow of blood through their system -- they are bound together by blood -- and one of them imagines ice water while the other shoots the warm and soothing junk.
When the narrator finishes his classes for the day, "My clothes were wet -- I may have looked as though I'd been sitt...