Meaning and relevance of sonny blues

In the story, he uses a narrator who narrates his own life as an Algebra teacher and his interaction with his brother Sonny. The story attempts to portray the kind of life black Americans were living, the struggles, and challenges, how they relate with each other and more importantly how they cope with the situation. However, the story only starts with at the point where the narrator discovers his brother is in jail for drug abuse while on his teaching job. It was essential for the writer to show the story's historical background to analyze the choices of Sonny and his brother in the article. The most significant issues in the story are pain and suffering that is both emotional and physical, loss through death and racism that the back people of colour are subjected two by the Native white American.

The writer also depicts the life of the narrator as full of stagnation. Notably, he continues to live in the same housing projects even after his life has changed, and also after a career in the military, he only becomes an Algebra teacher. Therefore, Baldwin contradicts his push for the redemption of the African American community by diminishing the narrator’s life. The narrator then thinks he was listening to the children because he thought he heard his brother in the voices of the children, and also himself too. The children reminded him of how he was not there for his brother. The loss that befell them manifests their lives as one full of tragedies. The writer did not give Sonny a chance to reform through positive occurrences but only chose the loss as his way of redemption which just drove him more into darkness.

Furthermore, the narrator also experienced loss even more than his brother. First, he loses his brother who he had abandoned to when he got jailed for drug use, an occurrence that heavily weighs on him as due to the promise he made to Sonny. Second, his daughter succumbs to polio at a very tender age, and this tragedy is what made him remember his brother in prison. According to Baldwin, in his article, "the image of the black community” he describes how the discrimination that black people got subjected to devastated their lives significantly. In the story, the narrator implies that race and racism underline every form of life that Africans lead (Sipiora 99). He uses Sonny and his brother to depict two different and unique paths that African American young men follow in their pursuit to change their current situation of life to better ones.

First, some prefer education and respectability as a way of fighting ignorance, poverty, and anguish among the black community in the ghettos. The second path is criminal activities, drug abuse and prison time. Also, he portrays jazz music as a genre of music that expresses of suffering and pain. Thus he only associated it to the blacks since the story indicates that they are the only ones suffering in the ghettos essentially advancing racism towards the Black Community. Therefore drugs and music are a means of coping with challenges and also an identity. Work Cited Albert, Richard N. The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin's" Sonny's Blues. Esquire. st July 1960: 70 – 76. Web. Baldwin, James "Sonny blues, "reading and writing about literature, 2nd Edition. Philip Sipiora.