49 pages • 1 hour read
James BaldwinSonny's Blues
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
Although the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” is unnamed, he is one of the story’s two central characters. As the story is narrated in first person, the reader learns much about the narrator’s life and worldview as he describes his relationship with Sonny. The brothers grow up as Black boys in Harlem’s housing projects. As such, the narrator grows deeply aware of the psychologically damaging effects of systemic racism and poverty from a young age. For the narrator, such racism manifests as a “darkness” that threatens to envelop the lives of Black people. The narrator describes being a child and seeing the signs of such darkness emerge in adults’ faces during social gatherings. Upon seeing this darkness, he immediately knew that it was “what [the adults] have come from. It’s what they endure” (27).
The narrator’s subsequent life choices are attempts to escape this darkness and flee the poverty that ensnares many of his friends and family. The narrator joins the army during World War II and later becomes an algebra teacher, which for the narrator are signs that “[he] had escaped” the “trap” of the housing projects (24). However, these choices cause growing estrangement from his younger brother Sonny. When the narrator sees Sonny at their mother’s funeral after years of being away, the two fight due to their divergent worldviews. When Sonny informs his brother of his plans to become a jazz musician, the narrator scolds Sonny and argues for a more practical understanding of life: “people can’t always do exactly what they want to do” (32). As the narrator focuses on creating a family with his wife and building a stable life for himself, he becomes more estranged from Sonny, who falls into drug addiction.
After Sonny’s imprisonment and subsequent release, the narrator begins to reconcile his relationship with his younger brother. A key catalyst for this reconciliation is the unexpected death of the narrator’s daughter from polio. Struggling with his own trauma allows the narrator to better empathize with Sonny’s suffering, and the narrator decides to reach out to Sonny. Though the narrator and Sonny initially quarrel over Sonny’s past drug use, the narrator resolves to empathize with and listen to Sonny, to avoid alienating him once again. The story ends with the narrator attending a Sonny’s performance at a nightclub. As the narrator listens to Sonny play, he can finally empathize with Sonny: “I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth” (47). As the song ends, the narrator sits in admiration of his brother and asks the bartender to order a drink for him—a sign of his respect for Sonny’s choices.
Sonny
Sonny is the narrator’s younger brother and the other central character in “Sonny’s Blues.” Since the reader learns of Sonny through the narrator’s eyes, little is known about Sonny at the beginning of the story besides his arrest for heroin use. However, as the story unfolds, the narrator informs the reader of Sonny’s life, his passion for music, and his subsequent struggle with drugs. Sonny’s outlook is more idealistic than his brother’s, as he believes one should place the pursuit of their dreams as their main priority: “I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?” (32). The brothers’ divergent beliefs cause frequent arguments, and Sonny sees the narrator’s worrying as overprotective and burdensome. He once tells the narrator, “you never hear anything I say” (34).
The narrator’s strictness with Sonny only causes distance between them, and Sonny ultimately runs away from home to pursue his music ambitions. After years of estrangement, however, Sonny is grateful to hear from his brother while in prison: “you don’t know how much I needed to hear from you” (22). Though the two subsequently seek to reconcile their relationship, there remains lingering tension from their earlier arguments. One day, Sonny confides in his brother about his drug addiction, which initially causes the narrator to recoil and make harsh judgments. Sonny explains how his drug use grew from his attempt to “keep from drowning in [suffering]” and describes how he often felt a “storm inside him” when he “[walked] these streets, black and funky and cold” (42). Though Sonny once used heroin to deal with his suffering, the book’s final scene shows Sonny finding solace through music and the piano. As Sonny performs in the nightclub, the narrator ponders how Sonny uses his suffering to create beautiful music, describing the music as “the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph” (47).
Daddy
Daddy, the narrator and Sonny’s father, makes a brief appearance in the story. Daddy is described as someone with alcoholism who always sought “something a little better” (26). Though the narrator believes that Sonny was “the apple of his father’s eye,” Sonny and his dad frequently quarreled (26). After Daddy’s death, Mama tells the narrator that Daddy once had a brother who died when they were walking home after a night of drinking and dancing. As they were walking, a car full of drunk white men drove down the road, hitting and killing Daddy’s brother. Mama says that Daddy was permanently traumatized by his brother’s death due to racist violence: “Your Daddy never did really get right again” (29).
Mama
Mama is the narrator and Sonny’s mother; she principally appears when the narrator is describing a conversation with her after Daddy’s death. Mama tells the narrator about how his father was scarred by his younger brother’s death, and how she had to subsequently watch after Daddy and “get [him] safely through this world” (29). Mama ends the conversation by imploring the narrator to protect his younger brother, telling him that while he might not be able to keep “nothing from happening” to Sonny, the narrator must “let [Sonny] know that you’s there” (30).
Related Titles
By James Baldwin
