Introduction
“Sonny’s Blues” is one of the most compelling short stories that effectively conveys its message to the target audience. The fiction story aims explicitly at telling the story of suffering among the Blacks living in America. The story takes the reader through the tales of two brothers who went down diverse life paths. Set in Harlem, the account targets people who live outside neighborhoods that lacked governmental aid and faced greater poverty at the time of writing the story. Although the fiction contains a lot of suffering from the beginning to the end, Baldwin effectively uses music to communicate. Indeed, the music serves as a source of empowerment for Sonny and the narrator, making them rekindle and rebuild their relationship as brothers. By the end, the short story effectively communicates its message to the target audience by stressing that suffering is universal and cyclical.
Suffering in Sonny’s Blues
Sonny’s Blues introduces a wide range of characters within the story and diverse suffering types. Indeed, suffering is constant throughout the storyline, with every character experiencing different hardships. From the murder of the storyteller’s uncle to Sonny’s drug addiction, torture remains a constant within the community (Davis, 20). Indeed, according to Sonny, suffering is inescapable, and the darkness that creeps into the narrator’s family and community serves as the primary symbol of this theme. Baldwin developed and emphasized this theme as a strategy to highlight suffering as a remedy for art and the prevalence of racism.
Role of Suffering in Sonny’s Blues
Baldwin uses the theme of suffering in sonny’s Blues to illustrate how suffering ruins the African-American community’s lives due to their unwillingness and inability to share their experiences. Specifically, the author uses this theme to demonstrate how suffering in silence makes people bitter, disgruntles relationships, and causes drug addiction, illness, or even death. Inescapable suffering in this short essay indicates the threats that await the blacks. While describing his students, the narrator said, “All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness” (Baldman 660). Besides, the incidents of racism are evident in the narrator’s mother’s vivid memory, where she remembered the tragic and savage killing of the speaker’s uncle by white men for pleasure and fun (Chakour 89). Hence, one role of suffering in this short story was to illustrate the highly prevalent racism within the surrounding environments that continued to affect African Americans adversely.
Additionally, suffering also serves as a remedy for art and redemption, regardless of all the pain it causes. As Pitari puts it, art suppresses personal feelings by bringing illusions that divert one’s eyes from the terrible truth (121). At one point, Sonny heard a voice of a woman singing a gospel song and said, “listening to that woman sing, it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through—to sing like that” (Baldwin 677). Similarly, Sonny’s music originates from a rather dark place and experiences. Thus, the authors use these to illustrate that the practical and creative use of suffering experiences can make one understand the true meaning of compassion that later leads to redemption.
Conclusion
Overall, suffering within the short story Sonny’s Blues is significant in outlining the impacts of racism and the influence of painful experiences on art. The well-articulated story effectively conveys its message to the target audience, specifically African Americans. Other than effectively illustrating the adverse impacts of racism, the theme shows how people can use their painful experiences to seek redemption. Considering that Baldwin wrote the story during the Civil Rights Movement, the fiction has numerous political implications. However, the concentration on the significance of acknowledging heritage and the community was crucial for the political struggles that the black community faced.
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. Sonny’s blues. Klett, 1970.
Chakour, Khaoula. “Racial Politics in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Studies in Literature and Language, vol.17, no.1, 2018, pp: 86-90.
Davis, Robin. “Memory and Emotional Estrangement in James Baldwin’s” Sonny’s Blues.”, 2021.
Pitari, Paolo. “Aeschylus at the Origin of Philosophy: Emanuele Severino’s Interpretation of the Aeschylean Tragedies.” Literature, vol.2, no.3, 2022, pp: 106-123.