What conclusions can you draw from the last few pages of "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin?

There is an old adage that states, "Happiness was born a twin"; indeed, one must share with others his/her joyful state for that emotion to be fully realized. By the same token, sorrow must be shared for it to attain significance. For, as Joseph Conrad writes in his story "The Secret Sharer," "meaning depends upon sharing." Certainly, in James Baldwin's powerful narrative "Sonny's Blues," Sonny's sorrow--his "cup of trembling"--can only attain meaning when the brother finally understands that Sonny "plays for his life"; that is, much like the street singer who has endured great suffering, Sonny plays the blues as he does with such rich feeling because he has felt great pain, he has felt "the blues." It is, then, after the narrator has felt the angst of losing his child that he understands Sonny's blues. And, it is then, sitting in the shadows of the nightclub, that "meaning depends upon [the] sharing" of these blues, music that is solace for their two souls, freeing them.

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

The brothers rescue each other, they redeem each other, they open up the world of suffering and give it meaning.

James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” is a product of a culture than should have never existed but for the legacy of racism and the depths to which some African Americans descended as the only recourse they could find from the misery in their lives.  Sadly, for so many of all ethnicities, escaping from the bleak realities of their lives involves drugs, and among the most pernicious and addictive of those is heroin.  Heroin is Sonny’s drug of choice in Baldwin’s story of an African American school teacher whose brother is the drug addict of the title, and whose passion for playing the blues and jazz piano provides his only legitimate release from his inner pain.  For much of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator, the aforementioned teacher, recounts the history of his estranged relationship with his younger brother, and provides crucial details regarding their alcoholic father whose premature death left the boys fatherless.  The narrator and Sonny’s father had been financially destitute, pretending to a level of courage and toughness that concealed a vulnerable, weak man.  In the following passage, the narrator describes his and Sonny’s father, and the complexity of the relationship between their father and the younger son:

“He died suddenly, during a drunken weekend in the middle of the war, when Sonny was fifteen. He and Sonny hadn't ever got on too well. And this was partly because Sonny was the apple of his father's eye. It was because he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him, that he was always fighting with him. It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached. But the principal reason that they never hit it off is that they were so much alike.”

The narrator can’t relate to his younger brother.  A stable, law-abiding professional – although in a low-paying job that keeps him and his family mired in poverty – he simply doesn’t understand the weaknesses of his brother and the attraction to a narcotic associated with the lowest forms of human existence.  He knows little of his brother as a human being, and seems to care even less.  His job at a public school in a low-income community exposes him regularly to the kind of teenage boys, his students, who remind him of his brother at that age:

“I was sure that the first time Sonny had ever had horse, he couldn't have been much older than these boys were now. These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.”

The final stage of Baldwin’s story exposes the narrator, and the reader, to the essence of Sonny’s existence, and it isn’t heroin.  Agreeing to accompany Sonny to the Greenwich Village jazz club where the younger brother regularly performs, the narrator enters an unfamiliar world that succeeds in helping him understand Sonny’s addictions to both drugs and to the music that provides Sonny’s sustenance.  It is by watching Sonny play the piano as part of a blues band that the narrator finally begins to appreciate and know his brother.  In the following passage from “Sonny’s Blues,” Baldwin’s narrator observes the connection of Sonny to a form of music born of the hardships and horrors of the African American experience – an experience still fully prevalent during the era in which this story was written:

“Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.”

As the narrator continues to describe this eye-opening experience, including the band leader, Creole’s, role in bringing Sonny back to the world he knows and loves, his relationship with his brother can finally be bridged.  Viewing Sonny in his most comfortable environment helps the narrator to find his own place in the world, and to better understand that world.

What lessons can be derived from "Sonny's Blues"?

Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" takes place in the pre-civil rights era in Harlem, which was and still is a largely African-American part of New York City. The title of the story is a play on words, since "blue" is a synonym for depression and the blues is a form of music based upon people's problems, a form generally credited as African-American in origin.  The narrator tells the story of his younger brother, Sonny, who is a gifted pianist, but who has struggled with drug addiction and has been incarcerated as a result. We learn of the boys' early lives and the tragic legacy of the boys' father, who watched his guitar-playing brother get run down and killed by a group of drunken white men. This is a story of despair and hope that has a great deal to teach us about darkness and pain, about the failure and endurance of fraternal love, about the curse of drug addiction, and about the gift of musical genius.

The boys' early lives are lived in poverty, and the narrator still lives in a "project," which is housing subsidized by the government.  While the narrator is now a teacher, he remains in the same area where he and Sonny have grown up, and he understands that drugs and crime are still out there, tempting the boys he teaches, as Sonny was tempted and succumbed. The neighborhood offers little in the way of opportunity, and its youth are angry at their limitations. This is a community of "mean streets."  Life is a struggle that does not end well for many.  It is important to understand this snapshot of history, if only to understand that in many ways, while it would seem that the civil rights era addressed these problems, the United States remains filled with such communities still.  We might have made some progress, but measured against this story, it is clear that there is a long way to go.  

The narrator distances himself emotionally from Sonny for many years, and he maintains this distance until Sonny writes to him from prison saying he needs him.  The narrator feels a great deal of guilt because his mother has asked him to look out for his brother, to learn from what happened to their father's brother, essentially, to not fail Sonny the way the father believed himself to have failed his brother.  So the narrator has let down his mother and his brother until he resumes contact with Sonny, takes him in when he finally leaves prison, and apparently really tries for the first time as the story ends to understand his brother and give him real emotional support.   We are meant to be our brothers' keepers, and if one lives in a world of darkness, this duty is even greater.  If we have a sibling with a disability, is it not incumbent upon us to look after that sibling?  Sonny is disabled by his early life and a disease that has crippled him. 

What saves Sonny is his gift, a talent for playing the piano, blues and jazz. This gift may very well arise out of his pain, as gifts like this sometimes do, in music, writing, and art.  Van Gogh created great art out of his curse of mental illness, for example, and Tchaikovsky was bipolar.  At the very end of the story, as the narrator finally hears Sonny perform at a club, he begins to understand that Sonny's gift can transport Sonny out of the darkness, along with those who hear him perform.  The narrator says that Sonny "could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did" (Baldwin 148).  It is Sonny's performance that allows the narrator to see his brother as a complete and beautiful person, not just an addict or a younger brother, but someone who is fighting to transcend his pain and his beginnings and bring light to himself and to others.  It is as though the narrator had opened Pandora's box, and finally hope has come out into the room. 

This is a story rich in learning, about the darkness of its time and place, a kind of darkness with us still, about brotherly love and family obligation, about the gift of music that can transform and transcend the pain of life.  Baldwin wrote "Sonny's Blues" in 1957, over fifty years ago, and it holds up well as a lesson in so many ways. 

One theme, among other themes explored in "Sonny's Blues," is the phenomenon of the transcendent, transformative power of the arts.

The narrator is an algebra teacher, a practical and responsible man who works and supports his family. After Sonny's arrest for using and selling heroin, he keeps his brother at a distance, immersed in his own life and problems, especially after he loses his young daughter.

When he and Sonny reconnect, the narrator has a very hard time understanding Sonny's desire to play music. He does not understand the jazz world at this time, and he feels it is beneath Sonny to play in nightclubs and "clown around" while people dance. The narrator does not realize that bebop, the type of jazz that Sonny wants to play, is a revolutionary art form that is beginning to pick up momentum at this time.

It is only after he goes to a jazz club in Greenwich Village and listens to Sonny play that the narrator realizes what this new, expressive form of jazz offers Sonny. The story's last words, "the very cup of trembling," communicates the idea that the music Sonny plays is an epiphany for both brothers.

We can learn a great deal from "Sonny's Blues." One lesson we learn from "Sonny's Blues" is that experience brings empathy. After learning about his brother's heroin addiction, the narrator does not reach out to help his brother, Sonny. Instead, he waits nearly half a year.

I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried. I was sitting in the living room in the dark, by myself, and I suddenly thought of Sonny. My trouble made his real.

Because the narrator has experienced the pain from the loss of his daughter, he understands the pain that his brother must be going through. Just as the narrator is alone in his room, he realizes that his brother must feel alone, and that is when he decides to reach out to him. We see the narrator's capacity for empathy in an earlier scene when the narrator is speaking to one of Sonny's friends.

"Look. Don't tell me your sad story, if it was up to me, I'd give you one." Then I felt guilty -- guilty, probably, for never having supposed that the poor bastard had a story of his own, much less a sad one.

While the narrator starts off angry at Sonny's friend, he begins to sympathize with him, and by the end of the scene he even gives the friend money.

The experience of reading gives the reader of this story an opportunity to empathize with Sonny and the narrator as well. Through reading we must put ourselves in the characters' shoes and experience their problems. Similarly, at the end of the story, the narrator, while listening to Sonny's band, realizes that the musicians are communicating their suffering through the music and that this music can help soothe those in the audience who are suffering. The suffering that is carried by the music is universal to all humans.

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.

What have the narrator and reader learned in the final two paragraphs of "Sonny's Blues"?

In the penultimate paragraph of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator says that he understands at last that Sonny “could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until he did.” He then says that he understands what Sonny has gone through and how his struggle will continue for the rest of his life.

Just before the final scene when Sonny plays the blues, the two brothers have talked honestly for the first time about Sonny’s drug addiction. Sonny compares the effect of drugs to that of music, and the narrator now understands this, seeing that music has a liberating and even transformative effect on both Sonny and his audience. In Sonny’s case, the blues set him free from his past, as well as from the lure of drugs. The image of the “cup of trembling” at the end of the final paragraph makes it clear that this is a continuous process. Sonny’s liberation from drugs and from despair is never final. It is precarious, and the struggle to maintain it will never end.

The reader makes a similar, though more generalized discovery, which is likely to be reinforced by experience. Music and other arts, including literature, may change your life and bring freedom, even redemption. However, this change is fragile and must be constantly renewed to have a lasting effect.