Sonny's Blues Character Analysis

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Abraham Lincoln once said “I am bound to live up to what light I have” and that is true of the characters in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Sonny’s Blues. The girls in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves were told to abandon their wolf nature and they embarked on the difficult task of changing everything they knew about the world. Sonny in Sonny’s Blues was a Harlem raised kid with a dim future who turned to heroin and had trouble deserting it, as most heroin addicts do. These challenges stemmed from their childhood environments. The characters in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Sonny’s Blues could not escape the control of their childhood influences. The children in Sonny’s Blues were terrified to grow up. In their neighborhoods, “[y]ou can see the darkness growing against the windowpanes.” (Baldwin 26) Their futures grew morbid as they matured and faced their reality. Sonny had once been one of the schoolboys with his head bumping “abruptly against the low ceiling of [his] actual possibilities.” (18) There was nowhere Sonny or any of the other kids could have gone for solace because when they walked “down into the street for light and air [they] found themselves encircled by disaster.” (24) There was some point for Sonny, and for most of these kids, when their strength to face the dim light of their futures was diminished. The drug abuser adults that surrounded Sonny seemed to suffer the least. Sonny was “going down, coming to nothing” when he started ditching school and lazing the day away with musicians in Greenwich (18). After going to jail for possession, Sonny was as clean and sober as an ex-heroin addict could be. Sonny said that heroin “‘makes you feel- in control.’” (40) His future contained nothing bright, no big opportunities, no promising careers or successful paths to follow. Sonny turned to heroin because he needed heroin “‘to stand it, to be able to make it at all.’” (40) Sonny admitted that he knew “‘[he] did awful things, those times, sometimes, to people.’” (43) He knew that heroin was not the smart choice, but it was the only choice he could see. Sonny’s choice to use heroin stemmed from his childhood community. The fact that he was raised somewhere where failure was the only option for a future meant that any small glint of hope he saw he would catch onto. Heroin was that glint of hope; a chance to take control of his life in that moment, instead of surrendering to his seemingly inevitable future. Like the characters in Sonny’s Blues, the girls in St. …show more content…
Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves were raised in an environment that dictated their futures. To them, “things felt less foreign in the dark.” (Russell 237) However, at St. Lucy’s, they were trying to stifle their desire to revert back to their wolf behavior. Claudette kept repeating to herself “[m]outh shut, shoes on feet” because she wanted to conform to the nuns’ teachings (240). During Stage 2 of their teachings, when Mirabella was not deserting her wolfish ways and was still travelling on all fours, the girls “could barely believe it… the shame of it, that [they] used to locomote like that.” (241) However, the wolf girls could not understand the purebred human girls they met. Claudette wondered what it would be like to be “always homesick for a dimly sensed forest, the trees you’ve never seen.” (245) The wolf girls adapted quickly to their new way of life but were still treading carefully. They did not want to regress back into their old ways. Like Sonny reverting back to heroin when life got difficult, the girls would revert back to wolf behavior when they felt nervous or scared. There were rumors about other wolf girls who hadn’t conformed to human society. There was pressure from the nuns not to slip up. They would threaten the girls by asking them “do you want to end up shunned by both species?” (243) When Claudette forgot the steps to the Sausalito, she felt “a howl clawing its way up [her] throat” (250) because the only thing she could manage to

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