Drug Addiction In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

“Lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings,” explains the Narrator as he and his brother, Sonny, drive through their home city of Harlem, New York, for the first time in a while—since Sonny recovered from a drug addiction. The setting remains in Harlem, but shifts between the past and the present as the Narrator weaves through the story; he explains his conversation with their mother about his younger brother, “You got to hold on to your brother,” his aversion to Sonny’s musical interest, and his life as a married man and Algebra teacher. The brothers struggle to communicate, as Sonny laments, “I hear you. But you never hear anything I say,” and the Narrator pushes Sonny towards quieting his musical aspirations but Sonny often quiets his true emotional reactions instead. Yet the brothers begin to hear the same note after happenstance brings them to the same outdoor music, and Sonny begins to open up about his drug addiction and seemingly shielded emotions, for the first time, in the Narrator’s house. This leads the two brothers to a nightclub where Sonny …show more content…
The way he weaved from the past to the present in such a harmonious way made the story captivating. The Narrator goes from expressing his innermost thoughts when first bringing Sonny home, “I was trying to find out something about my brother” to the past, “‘Safe!’ my father grunted…” and then back to the present “[my father] always went on like this….” Baldwin also seemed to utilize descriptions of characters’ eyes to convey a character’s actual feelings. When describing Sonny’s eyes after a fight with the Narrator over living with Isabel, he wrote, “There was something in his eyes I’d never seen before….” Or when he described a woman whom stood watching the music, “…her black eyes glittered like coal.” And finally, when he described those whom listed to the music outside, he wrote “…the eyes focusing on something