How does Baldwin use literary elements in "Sonny's Blues"?

In his 1957 short story "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin uses a variety of literary elements to develop complex narrative with multiple thematic concerns.

The story is told from a first-person point of view of narration; it is the voice of the titular character's brother. He and Sonny are in many ways foils; the narrator has led a conventional life as a husband, father and breadwinner. He is responsible, and at times has resented adding his brother Sonny to the list of his responsibilities. Sonny, on the other hand, has lived more on his own terms. He has become involved in the drug scene and spent time in prison as a result. His only enduring career aspiration has been the uncertain life of a jazz musician.

The story's themes include an original take on the rite of passage. Sonny and the narrator both undertake a path to adulthood that involves struggle and sacrifice. It is also a story about choices and consequences. The narrator has made good on his promise to their mother to look after Sonny, but he feels both guilt and resentment over it. And Sonny's decision to experiment with heroin costs him years of his life. However, staying true to his dream of playing jazz enables him to find his place onstage in New York as a new American art form is taking root. This triumph also enables his brother to find new respect for Sonny when he witnesses his brother finding his rightful place.

The story's structure incorporates a sure-handed balance of dialogue and the narrator's thoughts. Imagery of the diversity of New York deepen the story's setting and provide context for two brothers facing the additional struggles associated with race in mid-century urban America.

What literary elements, including connotative language, are used in "Sonny's Blues"?

Literary elements are those basic components that form a literary narrative such as a short story or a novel. While there is no fixed, or standardized, list of these elements, the following are commonly referred to in discussions of literary works:

Action, Character, Conflict, Dialogue, Genre, Language, Mood, Narrative, Mode, Pace, Plot, Point of View, Setting, Style, Theme, and Tone 

Here is a discussion of a few of these elements: 

Interestingly, the action of the plot of "Sonny's Blues" is not linear. In order to interrupt the action, Baldwin makes use of several flashbacks (which are a technique) in order to develop his characterization of the two brothers as well as to present two sides of the African American experience [eNotes: "Introduction"]. Sonny has remained in the world of the projects (setting) in which the boys were born, while the brother/narrator has become educated and moved up economically. 

The use of flashback temporarily halts the present action, and Baldwin also changes the pace of the narrative's action by providing insights into the characters with some returns to the past. This relating of past actions and conflicts also assists in character development since so often what has happened in the character's past provides additional information that aids in the understanding of a character in the present. In one particularly poignant and significant passage in "Sonny's Blues," the older brother remembers what his mother has told him about his father's brother, who was not unlike Sonny:

...your father's brother would sing, he had a fine voice, and play along with himself on his guitar....

But one night the uncle, who had been drinking, went behind a tree in order to relieve himself. When he came out, he went into the street, into the light. Unfortunately, there were some drunken and racist men coming, and before he could jump out of the way or his brother could get to him, these men had hit him with the speeding vehicle. Then, they were shooting and laughing. 

After hearing this horrific (mood) story about the senseless death of his uncle, the narrator realizes that he must try to keep Sonny from being destroyed (conflict: man vs. society). Since Sonny is like his uncle in several ways and has music in his soul, the brother accepts Sonny's invitation to accompany him to a jazz "joint in the village" (Greenwich Village). There Sonny plays piano from time to time.

The brothers talk. From the point of view of the narrator, the music of the street singers he has just listened to across the street has "soothe(d) the poison out of them," so he hopes that something similar may happen for Sonny when he plays at the club. Also, the narrator has listened as Sonny speaks of musicians. (At this point in the story, there is much dialogue.)

From his point of view Sonny describes them, using connotative language, words that carry cultural and emotional associations. As he speaks of a female street singer, for instance, Sonny observes, 

"...it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have to go through--to sing like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that much."

"Repulsive" has strongly negative connotations.

As he talks with his brother, the narrator has many things that he wants to say, but he cannot. So, he promises himself that he will never fail Sonny while he continues to listen.

"You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, ...and there's nothing shaking, and there's no way of getting it out--that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen." (Reflective tone and connotative language)

When his brother hears these words, his heart is touched, and he knows that he certainly must go and listen to Sonny play. At the club in the indigo light, Sonny plays the piano and he makes the piece his because he plays it with "burning." Those listening join Sonny in feeling free. Perceptively, the narrator observes,

Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to free if we would listen [a theme], that he would never be free until we did....And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.

Certainly, the connotative language of this passage--the emotional associations that certain words make for readers--is very powerful and lends the narrative and themes of "Sonny's Blues" much significance and meaning.

What literary elements, including connotative language, are used in "Sonny's Blues"?

Literary elements, a category of literary devices, are common to all literature. This is in contrast to literary techniques among which a writer chooses freely as they are not common to all literature. To illustrate this, a literary element is theme, another is conflict: These are common to all literature. A literary technique is onomatopoeia (words that sound like an action or happening, e.g., "the clap of thunder"), another is personification (endowing inanimate objects like hats or apples with human powers, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, etc): These are not common to all literature.

In the short story "Sonny's Blues" James Baldwin employs, along with other ones, the structural elements of theme, point of view, setting, narrator, protagonist, dynamic character, Man versus Society conflict, conflict, plot, foreshadowing, suspense, complication, crisis, climax, resolution. Connotative language is part of the diction the writer chooses. In "Sonny's Blues," Baldwin chooses middle (daily talking style of educated people) and low diction (uses colloquialisms, idiomatic phrases, slang, contractions, and may contain grammar and vocabulary and syntax errors). Connotative language is emotional language that elicits an emotional response from the reader, like in the resolution of the story in which the narrator and the reader both come to see that Sonny rises above his suffering--if only for a while--through the music he plays.

How does Baldwin use sound in "Sonny's Blues"?

At the heart of James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues" (1957) is a man trying to get his brother to listen to him. The "listening" is both literal and metaphorical: Sonny wants his reluctant older brother to hear his music and also to acknowledge his reality. Sound and music play a special role in rounding out this theme and in harmonizing it with the story's larger preoccupations with the African-American experience.

From the very beginning of the story, we see that the older brother has an uneasy relationship with sounds in general and music in particular. As the story opens, he has just received news of Sonny's arrest for using heroin. As a school-teacher who has escaped the pitfalls of growing up black and poor in Harlem, the narrator is petrified his brother has succumbed to the fate he himself has always feared. He ponders this after the class he's teaching has ended, but his solitude is broken by the sound of children's laughter:

Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the joyous laughter which-God knows why-one associates with children. It was mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother. And myself.

Thus, the children's voices evoke for the narrator his uneasiness with his own experience as an African-American man in the middle of the twentieth century. It is implied that most of the children are African American as well, since the narrator teaches at a school in Harlem. In the form of the laughter and music that bursts out of them, the narrator is only reminded of the limitations of his life and Sonny's. Even when he is stirred by the children's music, he seems to choke and silence that emotion, as we see in the following passage:

One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds. I stood up and walked over to the window and looked down into the court-yard. It was the beginning of the spring and the sap was rising in the boys. A teacher passed through them every now and again, quickly, as though he or she couldn't wait to get out of that courtyard, to get those boys out of their sight and off their minds.

In speaking of the teachers who can't wait to get "those boys out off their sights…and minds," the narrator is actually talking about himself. The children are like a tune he cannot get out of his head. This tug-of-war between sounds and silence often plays out in his private theater, as we see when a mutual acquaintance tells him about Sonny's arrest—significantly in a bar where the "juke box was blasting away with something black and bouncy."

Blackness—like in Sonny, like in sounds, and like in music—is a theme that intrudes upon the narrator's thoughts again and again. He simultaneously feels its pull (it is a part of him, after all) and wants to push it away because he has internalized society's prejudices about his identity. He also resists these elements because they remind him too closely of his preordained destiny as a black man. Since the story is set during the 1950s, this "destiny" implied that the American dream was not the same for everyone, especially for people of color. The narrator has accepted that someone like him cannot always do what he wants to, but Sonny has not accepted this. Therefore, the narrator shuts out Sonny for months at an end, neither talking nor listening to Sonny (even when he is in prison).

However, lest we think the narrator's outlook is too grim, Baldwin grounds it in the reality of experiences. Significantly, sound plays a role here too. Toward the middle of the story, the narrator recalls a secret his mother revealed to him the last time he saw her alive. In the mother's story, things take a bizarre turn when the narrator's father and his younger brother, a musician carrying his guitar, are walking down a country road one night. They come across a car—and not just any other car:

This car was full of white men. They was all drunk, and when they seen your father's brother they let out a great whoop and holler and they aimed the car straight at him. They was having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk. And I guess the boy, being drunk, too, and scared, kind of lost his head. By the time he jumped it was too late. Your father says he heard his brother scream when the car rolled over him, and he heard the wood of that guitar when it give, and he heard them strings go flying, and he heard them white men shouting, and the car kept on a-going and it ain't stopped till this day. And, time your father got down the hill, his brother weren't nothing but blood and pulp.

Note the "whoop and holler" of the white men, the hideous sounds of the guitar giving way, and the way they coalesce with the brother being reduced to "nothing but blood and pulp." The mother is recounting a simple fact: blackness too is a noise of sorts. To be black is to be noticed by the wrong kind of people.

Thus, the narrator's anxiety about Sonny coming to a bad end by any action that draws attention to him makes sense. When a young man can get mowed down for being visible and heard on a country road, the worst is always around the corner. Ironically, it is the white men who are making loud, threatening sounds while the black men walk silently by, yet the latter pay the price for occupying a public space. Through the mother's story, the narrator's mistrust of sound and music deepens even further.

When Sonny reveals to the narrator (at their mother's funeral) that his wish is to be a jazz musician, the narrator experiences something akin to revulsion:

"I want to play jazz," he said.

Well, the word had never before sounded as heavy, as real, as it sounded that afternoon in Sonny's mouth. I just looked at him and I was probably frowning a real frown by this time. I simply couldn't see why on earth he'd want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor. It seemed-beneath him, somehow. I had never thought about it before, had never been forced to, but I suppose I had always put jazz musicians in a class with what Daddy called "goodtime people."

The very sound of the word "jazz" is "heavy" and indolent: shameful to the narrator. Earlier, when Sonny has told him he wanted to be a musician, the narrator hopefully asks him if he wants to be "a concert pianist." Note the narrator's sub-conscious preference for a "white" form of music as opposed to "black" jazz. Again, we see internalized self-loathing play out as unease with the distinctive riffs and tugs of bebop music.

Another reason the narrator might dislike music and entertainment is because he thinks of them as an "escape" from reality. Earlier, he critiqued the young people with whom he grew up as being divided between the blackness of their circumstance and the "blackness" of the cinema. Cinema or entertainment has only served to distract these young people from their reality and served as a drug of sorts. Because he is carrying the burden of walking the straight and narrow path, the narrator has an attitude bordering the puritanical when it comes to anything less than practical.

However, toward the end of the story, the narrator's unease with music, Sonny, and his own identity all begin to resolve themselves. The narrator has finally agreed to "listen" to Sonny, accompanying him to a jazz club where Sonny is slated to play. In stark contrast to his turning away from sound earlier in the narrative, the jazz scene is described in great aural detail. The swoops and peaks of the music are observed, indicating that the narrator is finally beginning to give in to the transforming power of music. He now understands that jazz is Sonny's voice and an outlet for his suffering—a way for him to cope with his heroin addiction. His impression of "blackness" changes too, as we can see in these lines:

The waitress ran around, frantically getting in the last orders, guys and chicks got closer to each other, and the lights on the bandstand, on the quartet, turned to a kind of indigo. Then they all looked different there.

The quartet of Sonny, Creole, and the other two musicians playing together and the brother joining them in their rhapsody of rapture is indicative of the power of African Americans banding together as one. Jazz, far from being a lowly frivolous exercise, turns to a powerful proclamation of self-identity. Sounds which have separated the brothers now bring them together, much like a Gospel song or a spiritual.

Far from viewing Sonny as a boy perennially in peril as he did before, the older brother now sees him as the virtuoso he is. Sonny, like jazz, is also the symbol of a lament turned into freedom, a whole history of family suffering transfigured:

Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. 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.