Analysis of Sonny's Blues Story - Essay Example

? Literature: “Sonny’s Blues” ID Number: of the Assignment: The New Deal of School Teacher's Word Count: 1,086 Date: July 18, 2011 Introduction The story begins with the narrator (Sonny’s older brother) learning about his arrest for drug dealing from the morning’s newspapers. The whole story is one of melancholy in which black Americans continue to struggle against poverty, crime, illegal drugs, violence and racial discrimination even in a country as democratic as America. Many of the young African Americans tend to lose hope once they get past the elementary grades and realize that their lives are often greatly circumscribed by their impoverished circumstances. Many of the young people try to get out of their birth place and try their luck somewhere else. This is the preoccupation of majority of them and some of them turn to enlisting in the military in hopes of getting ahead by getting a good education that will propel them to respectability. Discussion The story centers on Sonny who is the younger brother of the story’s narrator. In the Sunday dinner, the narrator finally realizes how it is to feel the pain of Sonny whose life has taken a different turn because he pursued his life’s meaning which he found in jazz music. A general perception is that jazz is a music associated with melancholy and sorrows; in effect, what Sonny plays at the bar is a manifestation of the “blues” he felt in his life. The narrator, the older brother of Sonny, at first did not and could not understand how Sonny feels because he (the older brother) had struggled hard to get himself out of Harlem by enlisting for military service and so did not succumb to the culture of drugs, despondency and violence which had engulfed most of their neighborhood. In fact, the narrator achieved some measure of success by becoming a teacher, with a regular job and income to provide for his own family. Sonny is a different story altogether as he stopped going to school despite encouragement to finish his studies first before pursuing his life’s ambition which is to become a musician, a jazz one. He had a special talent for music with a good ear for playing the piano. “Sonny’s Blues” is actually an allegorical story about black America. Some blacks are able to lift themselves out of poverty and defeatism through sheer effort. The narrator brother was finally able to re-examine his own feelings towards Sonny as there was the time for them to finally be able to talk openly in a heart-to-heart manner. Everything about their own secret feelings, disappointments in life and plans for the future was discussed during that evening. The people inside their home were talking about not only the physical darkness that was gathering outside (due to the impending nightfall) but rather euphemistically of darkness which had been their lot through segregationist and racial discrimination policies in society. These black Americans were marginalized people in their own country, unable to avail of the usual benefits of open society because majority of the white were biased against them. The Sunday dinner scene contributes to the central conflict of the narrator by emphasizing how a good man can really overcome adversities in life if there is determination and persistence. The older brother had asked Sonny earlier to promise not to hurt himself in any way, such as by committing suicide due to his (Sonny’s) depressive mood. The narrator has come to realize that Sonny cannot be prevented from pursuing his life-long dream of becoming a jazz musician. This is Sonny’s unique way of expressing his innermost feelings to make him happy. Jazz has become, at that time, the cultural equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement before it became a real force for seeking political and social changes. Jazz music is variously described as soulful, race-affirming and according to some, a militant expression and also an unofficial sound of struggle (Saul 145). Sonny in effect had signified his own way of getting out of their oppressive neighborhood by turning to jazz music. It is his own way to expressing his joys in life, similar to his older brother who had managed to attain a degree of stability and achievement by becoming a teacher. In other words, his desire to be a jazz musician is just as legitimate an ambition in life as anybody else’s. The narrator’s central conflict was that he did not at first fully understand how jazz music can in fact be a very liberating experience. He had looked down on musicians as just some sort of fringe people who use drugs and eventually kill themselves in the process. This view conflicted him because he had promised their mother before she passed away that he would look after Sonny and yet Sonny is pursuing something entirely different which he had thought will not provide Sonny with any regular or stable income. The life of a musician can be very iffy at times and this was a legitimate concern of the narrator by his own admission. A musician can hardly be expected to fully support himself financially unless he is famous. Sonny is much focused on what he wants which is why he invited his older brother to watch one of his shows so that he (the older brother) might at least understand what jazz is. The moment of illumination happened when he (the narrator) finally heard the jazz music as played on the bandstand at the bar and realized that it can be a liberating experience for anyone who feels sad, depressed and beaten. It can be uplifting to listen to jazz music and this just shows that good music has a universal appeal. That music as played by Sonny that night contained a possible alternative to life’s hardships and consequently, the jazz music is described figuratively as light, in contrast to the gathering darkness mentioned earlier. Light here has a positive connotation in that Sonny has found a more satisfactory reconciliation of his personal struggles and demons compared to the narrator’s conventional lifestyle of being a married man, with family and a stable job as a school teacher (Recker 25). Conclusion People who are sad and depressed usually find an outlet for their feelings through the use of music; this is the case with jazz music which is soulful and militant to signify all the pain and struggles of colored people in America. The two brothers’ vastly different lives are reflections of how some blacks succeed despite all the obstacles while other fail in their lives. Jazz music has been symbolized as the sound of struggle of an oppressed people. Works Cited Recker, Christine. Varieties of Literary Interpretations of Jazz in American Writings of the 1950s and 1960s. Norderstedt, Germany: GRIN Verlag, 2006. Print. Saul, Scott. Freedom is, Freedom ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Read More