Within Sonny’s Blues, James Baldwin explores the narrator’s obsession with his other people’s suffering and how this consumes his life to the extent that he can no longer perceive his own struggle. In this way, Baldwin suggests that life’s greatest suffering is an inability to understand the sorrow of a loved one.
When the narrator is first introduced to the audience, he is a man burdened by responsibility and his own heavy subconscious. As his mind wanders after he learns about Sonny’s arrest, his dark thoughts and grim outlook represent how he has both suffered himself, and watched his friends suffer as “…their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” and heroin became more and more of a temptation. However, it soon becomes clear that, despite having been faced with the deaths of his little girl, mother and father, and the breakdown of his relationship with his brother, he is unable to see this …show more content…
At the nightclub, he sees Sonny through Sonny’s own eyes as “the man who creates the music” who “is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air”. Being there, listening to the band play and observing how the music sweeps around the room, the narrator is able to understand the most important part of Sonny and this comprehension frees his mind, for the first time, to think about his own life. He thinks about his daughter, about Isabel and her grief, but, unlike before, he also thinks about his own sadness. He admits that “I felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise,” and he extends an offering of milk and scotch acknowledging their fractured relationship and his new understand of the contrast of bitter and sweet, burning and nourishing in Sonny’s
When the narrator is first introduced to the audience, he is a man burdened by responsibility and his own heavy subconscious. As his mind wanders after he learns about Sonny’s arrest, his dark thoughts and grim outlook represent how he has both suffered himself, and watched his friends suffer as “…their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities.” and heroin became more and more of a temptation. However, it soon becomes clear that, despite having been faced with the deaths of his little girl, mother and father, and the breakdown of his relationship with his brother, he is unable to see this …show more content…
At the nightclub, he sees Sonny through Sonny’s own eyes as “the man who creates the music” who “is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air”. Being there, listening to the band play and observing how the music sweeps around the room, the narrator is able to understand the most important part of Sonny and this comprehension frees his mind, for the first time, to think about his own life. He thinks about his daughter, about Isabel and her grief, but, unlike before, he also thinks about his own sadness. He admits that “I felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise,” and he extends an offering of milk and scotch acknowledging their fractured relationship and his new understand of the contrast of bitter and sweet, burning and nourishing in Sonny’s