James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s story Sonny’s Blue has a repeating motif and theme symbolizing lightness and darkness. The author uses lightness and darkness as a metaphor to symbolize connections in our everyday life. I disagree with Michael Clark who suggests Baldwin uses all the metaphors to support childhood in the story. The author makes numerous connections with the motif to not only represent childhood, but also every stage of life. Baldwin uses the repeating metaphor of lightness and darkness to…

James Baldwin once said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious, is to be in rage almost all the time.” Living from 1922-1987, he lived in a great time of racial conflicts. Growing up in Harlem, NY, Baldwin faced constant discrimination and was often turned down jobs and other opportunities for being African American. Having been through such racial problems, most of James Baldwin's novels involved racial discrimination and judgment. After having his father leave him and…

How can one claim to want to push African American literature above and beyond its past limitations by creating new limitations on what can and should be created. The criticism coming from writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin felt understandable especially concerning wanting to leave behind the bourgeois attitude they felt the Harlem Renaissance writers had and focus on giving black readers a more in-depth examination of the black experience. However, I still found…

itself suggests, it creates an instant interest in the story and hooks them into the story. A hook can be a pivotal moment, makes the reader wonder, introduction of an interesting character or start with a compelling narrator. In “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, the author hooks the reader making them wonder and starting with a compelling narrator. The story starts with the narrator, a schoolteacher, reading a newspaper story in the subway that shocked him. The first line creates an interesting…

From James Baldwin, I have chosen “As Much truth as One can Bear” and from Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction”, both criticisms and diatribes against the literary culture of that era. Both writers make claims about the duty every writer has to the culture they live in, and it is these claims that make their points of view both reassuring and persuasive. In both Baldwin’s and Roth’s manifestos, there is at least a tacit insinuation that the writer should be highly valued in a culture. James…

They were taken away from their homeland, and forced into slavery for the American man’s benefit. You could call slavery the modern day kidnapping without ransom. How is it that this one race is looked down upon for being displaced? In James Baldwin’s essay “On Black English”, he furthermore proves blacks were set up to fail. “The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes” (pg. 80)…

expression through different genres and styles, and an art of creating new things without boundaries. Music is a very important element in the story of Sonny’s Blues, where it expresses a feeling of freedom and relaxation in the life of Sonny. In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," the theme of family relationships runs throughout the story. Thematically, we also see reference to the artist and his art. While the family relationship between the brothers is a strong thematic element that…

James Baldwin was a great African American essayist. In the story he wrote called “The Native Son” he talked about his father and his relationship with his father. He lived with his family and moves out a year before his father passed. When Baldwin talked about his father he talked about his father being this bitter man that no one liked no even his kids because of the way he handled himself. Although he was a minister and tried to seem like a saint in person his personal life was a different…

such as reverse racism, not addressing the deeper societal problems, and it is condescending to minorities. Much of this comes from the consequences of birthplace and race; a theme also explored in the source materials, “Letter to My Nephew” by James Baldwin. These problems can be easily seen through a deep evaluation and it is evident that the only true way to reach a colorblind society is to follow the lead of the eight states that have already…

In “Sonny’s Blues”, Baldwin tells the story of a young black adult’s struggles against his family and society in his goals to become a famous jazz musician. In the story, both the narrator and Sonny (his younger brother), grow up the same way, yet have opposite views on what determines future success and how they get there. While the narrator seeks to find a lifestyle that fits the general idea of an American family, Sonny seeks to live a life led by his own ambitions in a field where there is…