Self-Destruction In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s story’s “Sonny’s Blues” encounters how African Americans, were faced with the theme of suffering, as individuals shackled by incarceration, injustice, retrenchment, sheltering, drug dependency, and self-destruction. It highlights the battle of two siblings detached and trapped in the involvement of time, space, and ideals. The Narrator (Sonny’s brother) starts by explaining how the two brothers wrestle to perceive each other. He fails to understand his self-destruction yet skilled brother Sonny while the last-mentioned finds trouble in managing with the mediocrity that surrounds him. Efficient interact is much needed in the story of two siblings with two different outlooks of life where passion, anger, and misunderstanding may blow up at split seconds to put an end to one dear life of a prodigy. The brothers both come from Harlem. They are surrounded by a loving family and they learn to love each other but as the years go by, they grow apart. The narrator joins the army, leaving his family in Harlem for a while. When his father died, he came home. At this time, his mother tried to remind him of her teachings to always support his brother, who seemed to be failing at being an ideal citizen, the way the narrator perceived an ideal citizen would be. However, the …show more content…
He understands the pain that he kept to himself, the pain he never knew until his own daughter died and he and Isabel had to live with the pain, such as was expressed and could be glimpsed in the music that Sonny tried to hold on to and to wield to make something beautiful and good. In “Sonny’s Blues”, Baldwin writes about family and how it is embedded in the politics of drugs and racism. The story wins by showing how even though love and hatred collide in the worlds of Sonny and the narrator, understanding between the brothers helped them help each