Abstract
The Sonny’s Blues story begins at the point when a narrator, who remains unnamed in the story, but was identified as an algebra teacher reads the arrest of his brother who had been charged with selling Heroine. The teacher is therefore deeply perturbed and the thought of his brother keeps reminding him of the students in his class who also face the realities and the possibilities of the hostile world. The narrator again fails to pay a visit to the brother for a very long period until the time of the tragic death of his daughter. At this time, the narrator writes to the brother and afterwards the two develops a correspondence. This paper focuses on the formation of identity and the understanding of the vertical and the horizontal identities of the respective characters in the story. This is accompanied with the relevant citations from the narrative to explain further on the specific aspects as required by the instructions.
The Sonny’s Blues takes come into action around the mid of the 20th century, that is, around the early 1950s. This actions in the story takes place prior to the gains that were accomplished by the civil rights movement during the very dark days when there was a lot of segregation and as sort of separate yet equal accommodations in the institutions of the public. As the narrative outlines, then comes out very clear that the narrator and Sonny had been brought up in a poor black predominant neighborhood of Harlem. It also shows that the two main characters described here were the sons of an embittered father whose optimism and pride had been long shattered down by the brutal death of his brother at the hands of the white masters. This incidence sparked the years of struggling in a bid to try to support the family despite the overtly racist environment that formed part their environment (Baldwin et al, 18). The two characters, Sonny and the narrator grew up with a rush where their heads always bumped against the low ceilings of the actual possibilities that they had.
The vertical and the horizontal identities of the two main characters can be explained from the narrator and Sonny’s point of view. Sonny’s identity becomes very different from what the narrator originally perceived. At first, the narrator thought that he had features like a rough dog by what really what comes out of him are the features of a cunning child. Sonny blues provides quite a lot of insight not only to Sonny and their lives together but also to the environment where they lived. This story form the title seems to invoke Sonny but it is through the eyes of the narrator that the main characters that is Harlem and Sonny get revealed. This story is mainly narrated by an unnamed character who is Sonny`s brother. The narrator is a stable family man having two sons and one wife, the story begins when the narrator was on the subway and he was trying to read about the subject on the drug raid where Sonny his brother was arrested and is jailed. While continuing with reading the drug raid, the narrator is engulfed with sorrow and so at this point, another characters are introduced. The then introduced characters are the childhood friends of Sonny. At this moment, the narrator gets to a point of trying to explain what had happened to Sonny his brother and again he tries to understand how and why the brother became an addict.
The narrator then flashes back to the several scenes and the specific points when they were still children to the era of their young adulthood. At one of the scenes, their mother asked the narrator to take a good care for Sonny and to watch him out when she would die. She went ahead to tell the narrator on how their own father had a brother whom Sonny had taken so much after. This man was sadly killed or murdered by the white drunkards on the rural road of the Spouth.in the second flash back, the narrator of the story writes about the events that transpired during the event of their mother’s burial. He arranged for his brother Sonny to live with the family of his fiancée then at the time when he had gone for war. The character that the author has introduced in this scene is Ishabel, the lady who was his fiancée.
The narrator bring s a third flashback in his narrative where the brother Sonny clashed with the middle class family of Ishabel simply because they did not understand the great passion that he had for music. They too did not really understand Sonny’s desire to occasionally hung out with the local musicians downtown who were both black and white or rather his own personal rejection of the family`s values and the lifestyle they had (Carroll,19).
The military life of the brother of Sonny plays a very significant role when it come to the socio-historical context of the narrative. The narrator asserts "home on leave from the army". He remembers his father who suddenly died during a weekend when he became very drunk in the middle of war and at that time, Sonny was only fifteen. The key characters in the narrative Sonny Blues reflects this important tendency (Bruck, 17). That as a teenager, Sonny had yearned mainly to enlist the navy or the Army. The enlistment of the Amy could have been safer and sane than the remaining at home that was a cruel irony of the urban experience of his family. The narrator too was portrayed to have struggled too much in spite of the military service that he provided to his nation in order to attain the success and safety back at home. The narrator therefore writes that he dutifully returned back home and then became an Algebra teacher and a very productive member of the society. Despite the segregation and the discrimination that was highly prevalent the narrator ensures that his family lived in the good housing project that was already established in his society.
In conclusion, in the characterization of the “Sony Blues”, the dramatic action mostly concern the changes of the characters or rather the lack of them. The changes in the characters in the narrative are mostly very interesting and subtle since the plot of the narrative brings out a character who is mainly struggling with the addiction in heroine and also the efforts of the narrator to come into grips with the addiction of the character and his recovery. One of the most outstanding scenes that comes out in the narrative the one that portrays Sonny the artist. At this stage, the character is identified with a different identity as an artist and then later on identified as a prisoner when he is caught up in the drug raid and locked in the prison. This is a very clear indication that the characterization and the provision of the characters identity in a narrative is very key and thus very significant in the development of the plot of the narrative.
Work cited
Bruck, P. The Black American short story in the 20th century: a collection of critical essays. Amsterdam, B.R. Gruener Pub. Co. 2. 1989
Francis, Conseula. The Critical Reception of James Baldwin, 1963-2010: "an Honest Man and a Good Writer". 2014. Print.
Carroll, Aileen M. 150 Great Short Stories: Synopses, Quizzes, and Tests. Portland, Me: J. Weston Walch, 1989. Print.
Baldwin, James, and George Kirby. Sonny's Blues. Stuttgart [u.a.: Klett, 1998. Print.
