a way he never had before. He reaches out to Sonny after Sonny is released from rehab, and he seems to hope that Sonny will exhibit the warmth that the narrator himself is too emotionally repressed to fully show.

The narrator is finally able to unfreeze parts of himself that he locked away as he begins to have an understanding of Sonny and the way his music acts as emotional expression and release of pain.

Having grown up in the "vivid killing streets" of Harlem, Sonny, a sensitive musical man, senses the fear about which the older people do not speak; he suffers from the despair of his environment, the confrontation and and "the darkness which roared outside":

The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about....It's what they endure...Some escaped the trap, most didn't.  Those who got out, always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate a leg and leave it in the trap.

In order to deal with what Baldwin calls "the menace [that] was ...reality," Sonny shoots heroin into his veins as it gives him a feeling of being "in control," "some vision of his own," as he reveals to his brother when they peer through the window at a woman singing during a revival on the street.  Sonny remains in a "loose and dreamlike" state most of the time while he uses heroin.

Playing music, also, "makes something real" for Sonny.  His jazz helps Sonny release "that storm inside" him, and this is why he tells his brother that sometimes the musician will do anything to play as he recognizes all "that hatred and misery and love" that exists on the streets.  For, he is able to release much of his suffering when he plays music, especially, the blues.

When the brother/narrator accompanies Sonny to the club and hears Sonny play the blues, he realizes the power of Sonny's blues to deal "with the void," and to impose order on things.  About Sonny, he notes,

What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.....[the tale of how he suffers]...is never new, [but] it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

For the first time, the narrator realizes the power of music as a release from suffering.  For, after his daughter Grace has died, the brother understands Sonny:  "My trouble made his real."  In this realization, the narrator has an epiphany, perceiving his brother as, perhaps, a darker side of himself, and a side with which he can join in his efforts to keep out the darkness and fear of their environment.

The narrator of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" seems to cope with fear and pain by not really coping with them at all. In the beginning of the story, when he reads about Sonny's arrest in a newspaper, the narrator reacts with denial:

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that . . . I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long . . . but it never got less.

This passage indicates that his initial denial is followed by a sense of fear. He is obviously concerned about his brother. In the past, when Sonny told him that he wanted to be a jazz musician, the narrator worried about how Sonny's non-conventional life would turn out. The arrest is an example of his fears being realized. At the same time, it seems that his relationship with his brother has become quite distant. It seems to have been too painful for the narrator to think about his brother at all. Now that he knows of his brother's whereabouts, Sonny "became real . . . again." The narrator must face his fear and pain. This is why the ice that forms in him never really lessens; it is a burden the narrator cannot free himself from.

When Sonny gets out of jail, he and the narrator spend some time together, and the narrator even goes to see Sonny play his music. Seeing Sonny in his true element allows the brothers to establish a more meaningful bond. However, the story ends on a sort of ambiguous note, with the biblical allusion to "the very cup of trembling." This suggests that even though the brothers have reconnected, Sonny will still face troubles, and the narrator will have to find a way to cope with his anxiety and pain. Both characters need strategies for this, but Sonny says music helps him to work through those emotions. The narrator will need to find his own coping mechanism, as most of the story shows him avoiding what causes him pain.

Throughout most of the story, the narrator of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” keeps his feelings to himself. From the opening scene, in which he reads in the newspaper of his brother’s drug arrest, he acknowledges that he doesn’t have room for his feelings “inside,” and so he pushes them away. The narrator doesn’t write to his brother until after the loss of his little girl, a death he states rather matter-of-factly; the narrator seems to deal with all the trials and traumas in his life by bottling up his feelings and plowing ahead on his life path. This is in stark contrast to his brother—Sonny spends a lot of time analyzing the how’s and why’s of his life, and he copes with fear and pain in ways both dangerous, like drugs, and transcendent, like music. Sonny’s ease with emotions slowly lets the narrator open himself up to his own and by the last scene when both experience something like ecstasy while Sonny is playing a jazz show with his brother in the audience, the narrator is better able to be in touch with his feelings and with his difficult past in a whole new way.

The narrator in "Sonny's Blues" does not have a healthy way of dealing with fear and pain.  For the most part, the narrator keeps his feelings bottled up inside him, and he finds distractions from the events that give him pain.  The narrator refuses to really talk about his problems or the pain that he is feeling, and often he deflects onto Sonny.  The narrator often points out how Sonny has failed in life--like when Sonny stops going to school--but he does not consider that Sonny is actually trying to grapple with his own pain and fear.  Later in the story, Sonny tells the narrator that as time passes,

"[Y]ou realize nobody's listening.  So you've got to listen.  You got to find a way to listen."  

This advice is key to the moment at the end of the story when the narrator finally opens up to Sonny's music and thinks about the pain he has experienced from the deaths of his father's brother, his mother, and his daughter.  So, the narrator is able to find a way out of his closed mindset when he learns how to really listen.

At times in his life, the narrator uses avoidance in dealing with his fear, particularly relating to his brother. When he reads in the paper that his brother has gotten into trouble with the law because of his drug dependencies, the narrator's first instinct is not to reach out. And this is in spite of his promise to his mother that he would always look out for Sonny if anything happened to her. Instead, he waits months to contact Sonny and only does so after the loss of his own daughter.

In this, we see another way the narrator deals with pain as the tragedy of his daughter's illness and death seems to change him. At this point, he reaches out to his younger brother in an effort to cope with his own loss and, undoubtedly, the lack of fulfillment of the promises he'd made to his mother. In building this new relationship, he finally tries to empathize with Sonny and sees "the baby brother [he'd] never known [looking] out from the depths of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light."

We also see the narrator trying to control people and situations when he faces pain. In the loss of his mother, he forces his younger brother to live with his new bride's family even though no one involved thinks this is a good idea. When his brother tells him that he wants to leave Harlem, the narrator immediately shuts down his ideas, unknowingly forcing him to stay in the environment which would lead to his drug dependencies. When Sonny is trying to convey the significance of playing music, the narrator responds, "You know people can't always do exactly what they want to do," which is interesting considering that he is the one directly influencing his brother's ability to pursue his passions at this point. Sonny replies, "I think people ought to do what they want to do, what else are they alive for?" In the pain of losing his mother, the narrator is more concerned with directing Sonny's path in the way he thinks he should go; perhaps it is these words that cause him to reconsider the way he'd poorly controlled Sonny's decisions in the midst of his own pain.

The narrator's pain and fear, felt when he reads about his brother in the newspaper, is a feeling familiar to him. He compares it to ice melting in his guts; he is evidently uncomfortably sure that the article is true, but he decides to try to behave as if it is not. He tells himself that the story is "not to be believed." He attempts to go about his day, although he feels increasingly that he needs to "choke or scream."

The narrator expands upon what it means to him to ignore, or disbelieve, the things which unsettle him about his brother and that he has always done so. Having been told that Sonny was arrested on drug charges, the narrator suggests that he had been half-aware of his brother's drug use, but had "kept it outside [him]," not having "wanted to know." This strategy of ignoring things in the hopes that they might go away is how he has always dealt with the issue of Sonny, assuring himself that, while "wild," Sonny is not actually a bad person and would not really have done any of the things of which he stands accused. In reality, of course, the narrator knows that Sonny, like many others from within their neighborhood, has been set towards this bad road from the start, and it is really only through luck that he himself has escaped it.

The narrator copes with his pain and fear by ignoring it and pretending it does not exist.

The story begins when the narrator reads an article telling him that his brother Sonny has been arrested on drug charges.  He tries to cope with it as he always has, by ignoring it.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that ... And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny.  He became real to me again.

The narrator remembers several times during his life when he has used this same strategy.  When remembers his mother asking him to look after his brother, he regrets not having done so.  There were seven years between them, and he did not feel that close to his brother.

The use of flashbacks and memories in the story demonstrates an approach many of us take to things that are uncomfortable.  We put them off and retreat into ourselves.  We focus on our own lives, and try to leave our relatives’ problems behind.