JAMES BALDWIN'S "SONNY BLUES"

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).

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addiction fill the narrator "with that icy dread again" (Baldwin 622). He just does not understand his brother's world, and it is here that Baldwin displays the phenomenal gap between the two brother's worlds. It comes in the form of a dialogue exchange: " 'Sonny, name somebody - you know, a jazz musician you admire.' 'Bird.' 'Who?' 'Bird! Charlie Parker! Don't they teach you nothing in the goddamn army? He's just one of the greatest jazz musicians alive. Maybe the greatest.' 'All right. I'm ignorant. I'm sorry'" (Baldwin 627-8). This conversation shows the amazing gulf that separates the two brothers. The story was written in 1957 and during the 1950s Charlie Parker was unquestionably the jazz musician. He was also, despite his drug habit, an unbelievable source of pride to blacks, if they were "hip" enough to know the jazz world. Jazz is considered by many to be the primary art form that America has produced in the 20th century, and it is a black man's music. The narrator, in his ignorance of Charlie Parker, might as well have been expressing a lack of knowledge of Martin Luther King, Jr. The narrator, because he has chosen "straight" values, feels sorry for Sonny. In reflecting on his brother's lifesty

Category: Literature - J