The Sun is Blue

Can a man know happiness without knowing suffering? Can that same man hold
himself strongly against the temptations of said suffering? Let us dive into a time in
which we hear the suffering, we see the temptations and we feel the blues.
In the post-jazz era of the 1940s 1950s, the once dream like Harlem streets,
became poverty-stricken, droll and dangerous. In the 20s there had been such a move
towards flashy jazz shows and venues, bringing in massive floods of wealth to the music
performances and provocative fast paced tempos. Gradually the jazz scene faded as the
music choice would as well. As African American individuals became more and more
segregated, the distance between the wealthy and the poor grew further and further,
causing whole parts of Harlem to become populated by poverty, pushing performance
outward.
Thats where we find ourselves first; in the writing of a mister James Baldwin,
author of Sonnys Blues and civil rights activist of the 1960s. Sonnys Blues plays with
the symbols and motifs of suffering, light and darkness, as well as several others. The
way Baldwin is able to display such emphatic emotion through such vivid imagery and
situational organization, gives the reader a depth of understanding like no other. Sonnys
Blues revolves around a young musician that had gotten into a little trouble with a bit of a
heroin addiction, Sonny. The story is told from the perspective of Sonnys brother in an
un-chronological order, streaming in an out of narrations of flashbacks, somehow
progressing the story forward in relation to Sonny or the narrator himself, known as a
form of writing dubbed stream of consciousness.
I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and in the
bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside.
This is one of the very first sentences in Sonnys Blues and there is already a clear
representation of the motif, light and darkness. Baldwin uses these two in a most unlikely
way. The light is being used, as not only the commonly composed good things but is as
well a sort of revelation or attentive awareness, whilst the light reveals the darkness or
bad things.
I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldnt have been
much older than these boys were now. Horse being heroin, the narrator speaks of the
children in the classroom he teaches in, as if they have no idea of the potential dangers
outside of their protected worlds. Here Baldwin presents our next motif, hopelessness,
specifically in the African-American communities of Harlem. The children only know the
inside, or the safety of their innocence; yet, they have always been outside, in the
complete presence of temptation and sorrow. The heroin is most significant in terms of
how completely enveloping it is. The children believe they have a future beyond Harlem,
but in the eyes of Baldwin (reflected by the narrators opinion) the students have no
chance of leaving Harlem, no chance of success or true safety against the outside; the
hopelessness.
The depth that the narrator goes into of Sonnys path of addiction is quite scarce.
He shunned Sonny for eight years. When I saw the papers this morning, the first thing I
asked myself was if I had anything to do with it. I felt sort of responsible. The narrator
had felt responsible for Sonnys usage and resented the guilt, in-turn pushing himself
away from his brother. The narrator eventually writes to Sonny in prison after receiving
the papers stating Sonnys arrest. The death of Gracie, the narrators daughter, prompted
the writing to Sonny and Sonny was so glad he wrote. Sonny immediately wrote back
from prison and was so moved to hear from his brother again. Dear brother, You dont
know how much I needed to hear from you. Baldwin now presents the theme of
brotherly love. Showing an obligation towards a brothers love. Baldwin emphasizes and
fortifies this theme later on when Sonnys mother speaks to the narrator of her husband,
the father of both Sonny and the narrator; about how he and his brother were out one
night coming back from drinking with some friends and they both ran down a hill as a car
came straight at them ending in the brother jumping off of the cliff in a drunken fear for
his life. The mother then goes on to say how the narrator must watch over his brother
Sonny in the most vital ways. To always be there for his brother, because hes the only
one he has.
Throughout Sonnys Blues, Baldwin like any great writer indulges in allusions.
One particular allusion that might catch people off guard is a biblical reference. Baldwin
refers to the cup of trembling towards the end of Sonnys Blues. This very grouping of
words as a symbol is taken directly from the Bible, and represents the suffering and the
fear that reside in the people. Sonny drinks from a shaking glass of scotch and milk
paralleled to the cup of trembling reminding Sonny of the suffering and sorrow he
endured but leading him to safe-haven through redemption whether it be as means of his
music or through his change of life-decisions.