Outside Dangers In Sonny's Blues, By James Baldwin

People eat right, exercise, floss, and generally take care of themselves. They are protecting themselves from the inside out to keep themselves safe from outside dangers. But what if they started self-destructive behaviors? What if they no longer took care of themselves from the inside? What if they took drugs, made poor choices, or even committed suicide? With things like war, gangs, and evil people, one would think that outside dangers are what people need to guard against, but outside dangers are often not the biggest enemy. The biggest danger can instead be internal--or what people do or don’t do to themselves. Abraham Lincoln once said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If someone falters and loses their freedoms, it will …show more content…
There are two paths a person can take: the healthy path, which typically leads to success and fulfillment in life, or the misguided path, which leads to poor choices, a negative attitude and an unsuccessful life. In “Sonny's Blues,” by James Baldwin, Sonny faces losing his freedoms when he is arrested for using and selling heroin. Sonny grew up in Harlem, which was not a good place in which to be raised due to its violence and poverty rate. Sonny resorted to drugs as an answer to his problems. He has already been put on a hard path to start with and along with his recent arrest, he needed to reflect on himself and decide which path he wanted to take for the rest of his life. The two paths Sonny can take are the misguided path, where he would continue to take and sell heroin, which could potentially kill him or send him to jail again, or take the healthy, beneficial path, which is giving up taking and selling heroin. This could lead to him finally succeeding and getting out of Harlem. While talking about Sonny and looking into his future in terms of his drug problem, the narrator says, “You mean – they'll let him out. And then he'll just start working his way back in again. You mean he'll never kick the habit. Is that what you mean?” (Baldwin 108). In this sad and powerful quote, the narrator, who is actually Sonny’s brother, is starting to think that he’ll never get his brother back, as he is afraid Sonny’s drug problem has become a …show more content…
In “Sonny’s Blues,” Sonny lives a life filled with poverty and drugs, and in order for him to be saved, he has to choose the healthy road for him. For John Proctor, he puts himself in a bad situation and needs to sacrifice and take the path away from self-destruction to be saved. Everyone's challenges connect back to one counter-intuitive theme, that it is internal dangers and decisions inside one's self, more so than external dangers and the forces of others, that pose the greatest risks of