Sonny's Blues Rhetorical Analysis

In Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the unnamed narrator could possibly be described as a character that maintains an arbitrary, stereotype, fixed state of mind when it somehow comes to misjudge other people of his own racial background. Essentially, James Baldwin considers the 1950s jazz music issue that exemplifies the separation within the middle-class African-American community, which is characterized by the physical and personality differences between Sonny and anonymous storyteller. In the first place, Sonny, as a young African American, is aware and haunted by the burden he bears of being poor, black and trapped within the limits and obstacles of the conventional social order. Because Sonny has an urge for moving away from Harlem, he struggles to challenge the stereotypes by embarking on a career as a Blues musician. Instead of enjoying his liberty, Sonny ends up being in prison, and the narrator depicts him as a caged animal that is attempting to come forth from the results that jail has sit on him and from the drug addiction that brought him into his captivity. Sonny’s music is then the only one saving grace that grants him a possibility of his complete recovery. In order to compose music, Sonny has to endure the tragedies of his life and the lives of all African Americans that surround him. This supposed suffering will ultimately transform itself into an artistic expression that changes his audience. On the other hand, Sonny’s …show more content…
The narrator finally becomes conscious of his brother Sonny’s drug use, Sonny’s bohemian lifestyle and the risks Sonny takes to communicate his true