In the book Blue like Jazz there is a couple of conversion stories I would like to talk about. The first one comes from Chapter 4. It is the conversion of Millers friend Penny. Penny was a person who did not like Christians and Christianity based on the stereotypes that she had seen and the world has given to them. In the chapter it says that Penny wanted nothing to do with Christianity until she met a friend from her school. She went to college at the same place as miller, which is reed college, and after her freshman year she decided to study at a school in france. While there she was introduced to another student from Reed who she was very fond of and her…
Donald Murray, in “Complicated and Simple”, talks about how the author is emphasizing “man's need to find his identity” as the main issue society as well as Sonny and his brother are dealing with throughout the story. The area of Harlem with all its negative influences tend to affect its children's upcoming. Either to take the difficult route of finding one's self or to fall in the drug trap of Harlem “ it's simpler to submerge oneself, at the most dismal level, the limbo of drug addiction, rather than to truly find oneself” ( Murray 353).…
In the story "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin, is a powerful story that talked about the creativity and artistic in music. Sonny is a guys very passion for his music in life at the young age and he also have a dreams to become a great musicians jazz. His passion for music makes him impatient with everything else. Therefore, the contradictory lives of the two brothers that has contributed for the theme was very interesting by many things entanglements of time, space and ideals such as drop out of school, housing problems, drugs addiction, imprisonment and suicide. In his brother's view he is "wild" but not "hard or evil or disrespectful."…
Baldwin never exactly mentions the time, it is believed by most columnists that Sonny's Blues takes place somewhere in the 1950's, or in the Post-WWII era. The setting in which the story takes place is in Harlem. This period was a significant era for Harlem. Harlem happen to be a place separate from civilization where people were free to do as they pleased which permitted for creative art in the forms of writing, poetry, paintings, and music to display; yet, it also gave life to drug use, sexual quest, and destitution. The two biggest categories of music that seem to be suggested in Sonny's Blues are the Blues and Bebop. It is conveyed that Baldwin was trying to show a space between these two within their styles and time periods, much like…
In the play, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and the short story, Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin, we find two characters faced with very different situations and choices, requiring both to take a decision to either accept the conditions as they exist or accept the responsibility to change them.…
James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” exemplifies suffering as the major theme depicted through the struggle of two brothers as they try to understand one another. Baldwin’s underlying message deals with the hardships that African-Americans endured through the mid twentieth century, a time when race determined your status in society.…
The feelings of helplessness, confusion, and failure are all feelings expressed in the short story “Sonny's Blues”. “Sonny's Blues” is a story about two brothers trying to help each other out as they face many problem in their life and the story uses imagery of darkness and light to express certain situations. Darkness was used to mostly express Sonny's addiction but also the narrators personal life. The narrator was constantly surrounded by darkness even though he thought he was living a bright and successful life. The imagery light was noticeable in Sonny's physical character and early childhood. Light was strongly present in the final scene of the story when the brothers when at the bar and sonny was playing his music.…
Conscious Hip-hop is the modern form of the blues. Both genres of music express the hardships of the African American people in their respective time periods or explain the culture surrounding the artist and/or their community. Through their lyrics, the artists from the two genres are able to spread the culture and experiences of the black race.…
There are many things we learn of Sonny and his nameless brother in Sonny's Blues. We learn they're mannerisms, hobbies, occupations, and even their addictions. It seems we learn nearly everything about the pair; minus the narrators name, as previously stated. Hearing of their histories and the pains they've under gone, we see how they deal with their pain, which often truly tells character. Sonny's Blues isn't a story of two brothers living in a rough city; one of whom is a talented musician. The story is so much more, it's the point of tossing the main two stereotypes of African-Americans in an urban environment. The brothers cope with their own suffering and the suffering around them in two very different, but not uncommon ways.…
James Baldwin 's essay "Sonny 's Blues" is a story of the struggle of a jazz musician, Sonny, growing up in the harlem renaissance. It is told by the musician 's brother who takes Sonny into his own home after being released from heroin rehabilitation. The story examines Sonny 's path as a musician but has an underlying theme of the suffrage and attempted escape of Harlem residents at this point in history. Baldwin justifies Sonny 's drug habit by showing empathy for his struggle to obtain creative relief.…
The blues music has gone through a massive evolution since it first started out as a musical tradition for the African Americans and their slave culture. Since then we have seen many important improvements and milestones for when it comes to human rights and black music. The end of slave import and the end of segregation lead to black music in the radio among others. It became possible to record and possess music by African Americans with help from record labels like Okeh Records and Paramount Records, great artists like Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters had massive success, and in the late 1940s we even had a black man owning a radio station. After that the blues had a bit of a quiet period before we…
In “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, we learn about two brothers, Sonny, and his older brother, the narrator. This story is as much about the narrator as it is about Sonny. Despite the fact that each takes separate paths in life, both still go through an immense amount of suffering. While the unconditional love this family revives plays a vital role in their success as individuals, at the end of the day, it is the individual who will choose his own destiny. They are each able to rise above the trials and tribulations that have become socially acceptable in the community they have grown up in. Even though ultimately it is the individual that decides his own fate, this story is about the struggles two brothers go through in…
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness” (Baldwin 99). Suffering is part of the human condition that James Baldwin points out in “Sonny’s Blues” when two brothers are confronted with the darkness of Harlem life. Sonny uses heroin to get away from his pain but has found a hope of the light through blues music and wants to be a jazz musician; however, Sonny’s brother doesn’t understand about Sonny’s dream at the beginning of the story. Baldwin brings the reader into the African-American culture in Harlem to depict the internal…
Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin Sonny's Blues the author is presenting the past from the perspective of the present in order to understand his own feelings concerning the role of a father. The two brothers in the story had different life choices. Both Sonny and the narrator have found their own mode of escaping the violence and harshness of the ghetto, different though those modes might be. After the death of the mother the narrator feels he is his brother's keeper, because of the promise he made to the mother. He is not exactly happy about it and especially Sonny's life style. Nevertheless, this is his only brother and he made a promise not to turn his back on him. Sonny was more like his uncle a music lover. Before the mother died she told him about his father and the pain he went through after the death of his brother. His father's brother was a music lover and somewhat like Sonny. So, by telling this story it would help the narrator to understand Sonny. Now he knows a little about his family background and roots. At the end the narrator was finally able to see and understand what music did for Sonny; it allow him to be himself and express himself to other. Explore the implications of the allusion to the Book of Isaiah 51:17-23 in the concluding sentence. What has the narrator learned as the result of his experience? All of the desolation, destruction, famine, sword things that we (the narrator) go through in this life, are learned through other who have shared these same experiences. Our oppressor (Satan spiritually, mankind physically) causes a trembling in our lives; but just like Jerusalem, who was and still is oppressed; God has already taken our "cup of trembling". We are delivered through the sharing of our experiences with one another, freeing ourselves from one who causes the trembling. It was once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn; it is because we do not listen, or learn from one another. Sonny made his own history…
Why B.B King is the most influential person of the blues era? With all the trials and tribulations, he had to go through in his life, he became the most influential artist there was of the blues era. Although B.B, had great success added to his name, the simple fact of his birth place could have created havoc on his future. Mississippi was known for its dislike of African Americans and during this time there were no laws to protect them. In the year that B.B King was born seventeen African Americans had been lynched in America and the Ku Klux Klan reported had 1 billion members. Economically, most black families farmed and sharecropped and during the twenties sharecropping was another form of slavery.…