Music In Sonny's Blues

After the narrator goes with Sonny to the Jazz club, he meets Sonny’s friends and sees how they appreciate him and his music in a way he never did. He then begins to see the importance of music to his brother and makes a discovery about himself and Sonny. He listens to Sonny play and is delighted and starts to accept his brothers wanting to be a musician. The narrator realizes he was wrong to try and make Sonny change and he sees the power of Sonny’s blues as he is playing. The acceptance over Sonny’s dream not only strengthened their relationship, but also helped them gain a better understanding of each other.

The thought of his brother trying to pursue a career of being a pianist just didn’t settle right with the narrator. Towards the end of the story, Sonny was able to show his brother what he was truly passionate about. As he played the piano, Sonny graced the narrator with the true beauty of who he was as a person. The narrator was able to describe in great detail how moved he was by Sonny’s music. The narrator stated, “I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting” (Baldwin 382).

Rhythm of the Soul “Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't” (Depp). In some cases, music can convey people’s emotions, feelings, and thoughts stronger than words can. In James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny’s Blues”, the narrator and his younger brother Sonny struggle with a communication barrier. Sonny can express his emotions by the language of music that his older brother, the narrator, has a difficult time understanding. The narrator, who is a stable school teacher, has a hard time relating to his younger brother and the other kids from their neighborhood, who became heroin addicts.

Trying to get out of the city a few years earlier by joining the army like his brother, he returned to the place that he knew best, Harlem. However, unlike his brother who made something of himself, Sonny’s aspiration was to be a musician. Upset with Sonny’s desire, the narrator did not understand why Sonny wanted “to spend his time hanging around nightclubs” (Baldwin 1978). We can assume the narrator associates these types of establishments with partying, mischievous mischief and drugs; a common occurrence in a poverty stricken section of New York like Harlem. Though the narrator judges the nightclubs as a bad influence on Sonny’s survival, Sonny uses his music to escape the many obstacles he faces everyday as a poor black man in

Diamond Williams Professor Wolfe LIT2001 3 January 16 Fiction Analysis “Sonny’s Blues” is a short story written by James Baldwin that reflects on the ongoing struggles between failure and atonement amongst two brothers. The older brother who is also the narrator, gives us insight on the struggles in Harlem, and the life he had with his drug addicted younger brother, Sonny. As we follow the narrator, we later discover who Sonny really is. Published in the mid nineteen hundreds, the burdensome of living in Harlem in “Sonny’s Blues” reflects the life that James Baldwin endured.

Daniel Felsenfeld began his self-proclaimed “uninspiring” musical journey in High School. During this time he labored over musical pieces that left him feeling unfulfilled. His conflict of disinterest in Chopin Preludes and Beethoven’s Sonata led Felsenfeld to move on from professional music lessons to performing at piano bars. We have all felt a switch in our mood from an old song that provokes sad memories to an upbeat lyric that makes us want to dance. Music is known for bringing out the person you are truly deeply inside like the young man in Benjamin Zander’s Speech.

Combining a love for music and a personal history of racism, segregation, poverty and drugs in 1940’s Harlem, James Baldwin tells a story about Sonny, a blues loving composer with a dark history, living in Harlem in the early 1900’s. In the story “Sonny’s Blues” we meet the narrator and his brother and learn about the hardships of their lives, including the loss of their parents and a lifelong struggle with heroin addiction. As Sonny grows up in a racial charged borough of New York City he learns how to play the piano and channels his loss and suffering into music that provides an escape for others. Baldwin utilizes symbolism, flashbacks and antithesis to propose the idea that people can get through the trials and tribulations of life by being their brother’s keeper and looking out

Workmanship assumes an imperative part in "Sonny's Blues", going about as a scaffold between the two siblings. Sonny's powerlessness to talk and the storyteller's (Sonny’s Brother) failure to listen, keep the siblings from genuinely corresponding with or understanding each other for most of their lives. Music is what Sonny can make himself to be. Seeing the music of the road recovery actually brings the siblings closer, inciting their first fair discussion.

How is darkness encountered by the narrator and his dear brother Sonny? Why does the narrator promise his mother this? Is Sonny like his uncle or the narrator like his father? In Sonny’s Blues the theme of light and darkness describes the problems the characters are facing with reality.

In James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”, after the death of the narrator’s daughter; he decides to contact his estrange younger brother Sonny; a recovering heroin addict and musician who is in jail. After his release, the brothers reunite and readers learn the family history and experiences from the narrator’s perspective. Together, the brothers experience flow, a positive sensation developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, he described it as being immersed in an activity that results in other’s actions becoming irrelevant (Howell). Throughout the story, flow is continually encountered by Sonny and the narrator. There are many scenes in the text that Sonny did experience flow, some had started in his earlier lifetime.

Poe’s stories “Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” display the dark romantic theme of a man’s soul by the development of the setting, plot, and characterization. As both stories begin, the initial device used to advance the theme is setting, which remains grim and sinister throughout the duration of both stories. Accompanying these physical details is the plot, each of which includes the murder of an innocent man. Most notably, the characterization of each piece’s narrator allows the audience to fully understand their internal struggle and its final resolution. While “Cask of Amontillado” contains an overall intriguing and unexpected plot as well as setting, the narrator’s characterization proves this story to conclude in a less

“But Tomorrow I die, Today I would unburthen my soul,”[pg.115]. The author Edgar Allen Poe, Wrote these horror stories titled, The Black Cat, and The Tell-Tale Heart, which took place at night. In the story, The main character, The narrator, Killed the cat and killed the old man and he regretted both of them. You should not kill things you love even if they did something bad to you. First, We'll find out how the setting conflicts with my theme.