Crystal Blomquist, Fall 2009
The writings of James Baldwin often explore the concept of identity within the African American community, and his short story “Sonny’s Blues” is no exception. The story depicts the struggle of two brothers in discovering their own identities. The two live in a racially segregated world, and like many other African Americans this racism effects how they view themselves, and how they themselves are viewed. The story illustrates the problems that African Americans have in finding their own identity through the story’s use of setting, motif, and imagery.
“Sonny’s Blues” takes place in Harlem, a predominately black neighborhood of New York City. The neighborhood depicted as crime-ridden and poverty stricken, an example of how whites segregate blacks into certain areas. The two brothers spent their adolescence in the atmosphere of the ghetto, watching the “vivid, killing streets” (Baldwin 112). The young people of Harlem are described negatively, as a product of their harsh environment: “he hadn’t ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick…especially in Harlem” (Baldwin 103). The physical surrounding influence the way they look at the world, having “their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities” (Baldwin 104). The brothers’ lives are full of suffering due to racism, and the ghetto life, and this pain is a part of their identity.
Suffering is a motif that runs throughout the narrative, and also through the history of African Americans, beginning in their days of slavery. What unites blacks together is suffering, which many feel because of the white culture that dominates them, and it becomes a part of their identity. The brothers are raised with this history, and it no doubt influenced them, especially when they experience their own kind of suffering. The narrator’s infant daughter dies, and he finally identifies with his own family history of suffering, feeling the same pain that his father felt seeing his brother killed by drunken white men (Baldwin 117). Sonny has felt this suffering before, and it drives him to drug addiction, as a way “to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem …like you” (Baldwin 132). Sonny becomes an addict, as way to discover himself, but it ends up becoming his identity. Sonny’s struggle with suffering defines him not as an individual but as a black stereotype like many African Americans. Sonny engages in another outlet to express the suffering of his people, and of himself—music.
Music is another motif, with jazz and the blues mentioned throughout the story. The two forms of music are exclusively African American, and Lawrence W. Levine, in his article “Jazz and American Culture,” examines how these forms of music have become part of American culture, and their uses. In the racially segregated society of “Sonny’s Blues,” jazz and the blues “provide a sense of power and control, a sense of meaning and direction” (Levine 15). White America can control every other aspect of African American life–where they live, what jobs they can work, what schools they can attend—but they can’t control their music. Jazz and the blues are seen as a way to revolt against the oppressive American society of the time (Levine 15). Music is also a way for blacks to tell their own story, a form of folklore, as Sonny explains to his brother: “the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may find triumph…there isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness” (Baldwin 139). The imagery of light and darkness is used to demonstrate the struggle for identity that the two brothers experience, along with many other African Americans.
The imagery of light and darkness is mentioned rampantly in the story, symbolizing the struggle that the two brothers have in finding their own identities. Sonny, the more disillusioned of the two, is described as “going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out…” (Baldwin 104). The narrator describes the disillusionment of a child, a double of himself, as if he was waking up from a dream: “In a moment someone will turn on the light…And when the light fills the room…he’s moved just a little closer to the darkness outside” (Baldwin 115). The light imagery symbolizes dreams, what the brothers envision to be, and the darkness symbolizes reality, what the brothers can be. The imagery illustrates the struggle of African Americans to define themselves in a society that molds them into stereotypes.
Baldwin was very much like his characters, an African American struggling to define himself in a racially oppressive society. In “Sonny’s Blues” he uses the formal elements of setting, motif, and imagery to convey what he and many of his community experience in the universal exploration that all people engage in during their lives. American society has made strides since Baldwin wrote the story, but finding one’s identity can still be difficult in the African American community today. By exploring the text a reader can know that there have been others in a similar situation before them, and that can help them in their search for an identity.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Going to Meet the Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. 101-43. Print.
Levine, Lawrence W. “Jazz and American Culture.” The Journal of American Folklore 102.403 (1989): 6-22. JSTOR. Web. 4 Dec 2009.