Sonny's Blues

Nothing is Impossible

Your youngest brother or sister is thousands of miles away from you and their life might be in jeopardy. This knowledge is known because of newspaper articles that discuss your sibling’s difficulty with a strong addiction to life taking drugs such as heroin. Illegal drugs like this have been known to take the lives of millions of people. With these facts put in place, there is a chance that the drug user identified as your brother or sister may lose their sight of a healthy lifestyle and never live up to their full potential. As the older brother or sister, you may think of a variety of ideas such as whether their alright, how this all happened, and if there is something you can do to help. This predicament was displayed in a famous short story called” Sonny’s Blues” written by James Baldwin. As a person, one must either choose to take on these problems or ignore them. The older brother known as the narrator throughout the whole story took on these extra responsibilities in order to help transform his younger brother’s life. The younger brother named Sonny portrayed strong evidence throughout the story that he was able to renew his life through his love and passion for blues music. However, Sonny is not the only one who goes through self-renewal. The older brother also renews his life by realizing what is really important to him and how to be a genuine brother.

Sonny’s jazz performance in front of his older brother at the end of the story is loaded with evidence that they both have renewed their lives. This proof is found in the final pages of Baldwin’s excellent literature of “Sonny’s Blues”. At the start of Sonny’s performance, he was a little nervous because of his older brother’s presence along with not having heroin to clear his mind of any type of fear such as stage fright. “I just watched Sonny’s face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him… He (Creole) wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water… And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like one in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breathe of life, his own.” (371) These beautiful quotes portray self-renewal for Sonny by showing how he ultimately changed his ways for the better, by not doing heroin before performing his blues music. Baldwin describes Sonny’s troubled face at the start of the performance, which shows that that Sonny is fighting his addiction. It takes much time to fully recover from a tragic addiction of this magnitude, but it certainly is a start. This is the mark of a rigorous journey Sonny will have to conquer to complete his quest of self-renewal. One of the band members was named Creole. Creole wanted Sonny to snap out of his fear of the audience and the fear of not being “high”. If Sonny wanted to move away from his past, he needed to step up his motive, and perform beautiful music he is capable of demonstrating. The older brother after seeing Sonny’s struggle to conduct his music really makes him think of how hard it is to perform at the audience’s expectations. He then is able to tell that everything that Sonny is playing, truly expresses his personal struggles with discrimination during the harsh times of being an African American in the middle of the 20th century and the battle he faces with his drug addiction. The older brother realizes he needs to support his brother with his goal of being a jazz pianist because this is the best way for Sonny to revolutionize his life.

In the first half of the story, Sonny and his older brother discuss Sonny’s future. The older brother goes through self-renewal by making the mistake of trying to make the decisions for Sonny and pointing him to a future that the older brother perceives to be the best fit for Sonny’s life. Instead of the older brother trying to make Sonny’s decision, he needs to let his younger brother grow on his own and make his own decisions. “Well, Sonny, you know people can’t always do exactly what they want to do.” (361) Sonny counters by saying, “No, I don’t know that, I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for.” (361) Sonny tells his brother black and white that blues music is very important to him and he does not