Sonny's Blues-Light Vs. Dark: Battle Or Balance?

Light versus Dark: Battle or Balance?

James Baldwin’s authorial attitude in “Sonny’s Blues” represents his view that in order to escape the metaphorical darkness and reach the light, Sonny must strike a balance between his personal lightness and darkness. James Baldwin uses powerful diction and the narration of Sonny’s escape to prove this. James Baldwin uses powerful descriptive language to create Harlem’s dark image, one that particularly, Sonny desperately wants to escape. Baldwin hyperbolizes Harlem’s buildings to show that the narrators believes that Harlem represents a dark place that oppresses Sonny:
But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we had once been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. (Baldwin 8)
This line describes the darkness, but also implies that it will forever cloak Harlem because it truly remains the same.
Harlem’s powerful darkness extensively affects its residents, including Sonny, and in turn, they become bleak and depressed. Sonny says “every face looks darkening, like the sky outside” (Baldwin 10) to exemplify his negative outlook, as well as the condition Harlem’s residents. Even Harlem’s young and innocent residents, impervious to Harlem’s gloom, receive an indirect impact: “The silence, the darkness coming, and the darkness in the faces frighten the children obscurely” (Baldwin 14). Baldwin’s dark imagery acutely describes Harlem’s tumultuous nature, providing Sonny multiple reasons to desire an
escape. Although Baldwin heavily emphasizes Harlem’s darkness, he hints that its antithesis may not be much more preferable. Baldwin underscores light versus dark throughout the story; however, at one point, he seemingly undermines the idea that light reveals positivity and writes: “the bright sun deadened his damp dark brown skin and it made his eyes look yellow and showed up the dirt in his kinked hair” (Baldwin 16). Baldwin implies that, occasionally, darkness remains preferable to light, because instead of allowing the escapee to shine, the light only reveals the hideousness that was previously hidden. Despite this, Sonny still yearns to escape the darkness because he aspires to succeed as a jazz musician and Baldwin informs the reader of this by saying: “yet when he smiled, when we shook hands, the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light” (Baldwin 28). For Sonny, the music blends the light and dark, allowing him to accept Harlem’s darkness and see the light that he uses to fuel his intense musical creativity. At the closing of Sonny’s Blues, Sonny finally overcomes the darkness of Harlem and stands under the bright lights of the jazz stage. Baldwin writes “And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours” (Baldwin 30). Sonny perseveres and overcomes his drug addiction, and turns the negative influence that Harlem exacted on him into something positive that everyone can embrace.