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Suffering, Anger And Isolation In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

552 Words3 Pages

“Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin is a short story that has many significant parts to it. The narrator gives readers insight on how his relationship with his brother was like, how his brother was suffering from a heroin addiction. The narrator also gives the readers insight on his own problems. Due to Sonny’s heroin addiction, he suffered quite a lot as what was implied in the story. The narrator implies and describes so many themes in this short story. The main themes in this story is suffering, anger and isolation. First, suffering is one of the themes because Sonny suffered a heroin addiction. “He had been picked up the day before, in a raid on an apartment downtown, for peddling and using heroin(Baldwin,123).” The narrator told how Sonny got arrested for selling and using heroin. This is a suffer for Sonny because he fell in the wrong path and started hanging around with the wrong crowd and ended up doing drugs. Sonny knows that he is suffering and is hurting others in his wrong actions. I am glad our parents are dead because they won’t see what is happening to their …show more content…

Anger is a theme in this story because the narrator and Sonny have problems where they are anger at each other most of the time that they have a conversation. “Then I got mad. It was because I was so scared. “You must be crazy. You goddamn fool, what the hell do you want to go and join the army for? (Baldwin 136)” The narrator and Sonny had an argument on why is Sonny joining the army. They argue a lot and the narrator feels like it is unhealthy for him and Sonny. We had a fight, it was very bad. So bad that I did not see him for months (Baldwin 139). The narrator and Sonny had a pretty big fight and they did not to see each other for months. The narrator put this in the story to give the readers insight on how Sonny and him fought. This is just some of the textual evidence of anger between the narrator and

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