The Theme Of Light And Dark In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

When a giant star explodes into a supernova, it can eject terrifying flash of radiation known as gamma ray bursts, one of the brightest electromagnetic event in the universe. But in order to find the brightest sustaining phenomena, one paradoxically has to look at the darkest thing in the universe: a black hole. Black holes interact with light, reflecting so little, that they do not let any escape. That is dark but the intense energies created by black holes in the process of eating stars is anything but dark. The level of complexity of light and dark that we see in the universe can also be seen in James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”. In “Sonny’s Blues”, James Baldwin looks past the normal literary uses of light and dark imagery as representing good and bad, but instead uses them to capture characters’ hardships, their struggles with racial injustice, and the loss of innocence of childhood.
Immediately from the opening scene, Baldwin introduces the notion of darkness to represent suffering in the lives of the characters in the story. Right from the first paragraph, the reader can see the recurring images of light and dark, as the narrator contemplates Sonny’s fate: “I stared at it in the swinging lights …show more content…
As the characters grow and change in the story, the interpretation of the light and dark change. The narrator focuses on the contrast between dark and light, with darkness as the suffering that must be avoided and escaped. But as he gets to know Sonny, he realizes for Sonny, whereas darkness provides shelter and relief, while light brings nothing but sadness and suffering. At times, Baldwin presents lightness and darkness as inseparable entities, existing in harmony like Yin and Yang. He also shows their dualities and complexities to illustrate how the shades of light