What led Sonny to use heroin in "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin?
In the story "Sonny's Blues," Sonny says...
...what heroin feels like sometimes-when it's in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And- and sure." He sipped his beer, very deliberately not looking at me. I watched his face. "It makes you feel-in control. Sometimes you've got to have that feeling."
When Sonny speaks, he refers to suffering in life. And as he tries to describe it to his brother, he says that everyone suffers and everyone tries to find the best way to deal with it. While the narrator believes that the drug will kill the user and that somehow that is the user's intent, what Sonny says is that he only wants to survive and he sees the heroin as his lifeline.
Listening to Sonny, the reader learns that other users he knows all need the drug, but handle the...
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addiction in different ways: accepting that it's a part of life, or denying it altogether.
Perhaps the control Sonny feels keeps the fear at bay: the fear of suffering—the same fear the adults saw as the evening arrived on Sunday afternoons in the living room. The children did not understand it, and perhaps Sonny does not really understand it either even though he is no longer a child. Perhaps the heroin allows him to avoid fear, and maintain a distance from the suffering that life brings with it.
Sonny's reasons for using all seems to revolve around suffering and surviving. Sonny's redemption is seen when he finds his way in the music at the club, but the true sadness comes from Sonny's childhood friend who the narrator meets leaving school as the story begins: telling the reader with chilling clarity that no matter what may happen while Sonny is in jail—he may get cleaned up—he will never be free of the addiction.
And so the terrible irony is clear: Sonny takes the heroin so that he can feel like he is in control. The truth is that the control he feels is really a lie, an illusion. Sonny does not have the control: the drug does. If Sonny's friend is correct, the relationship between Sonny and the drug will never change.
What is Sonny seeking when he uses heroin in "Sonny's Blues"?
The way Sonny explains his heroin use to his brother in the falling action of the story after both brothers witness the same event at the revival meeting while watching from entirely different locations, heroine allows Sonny to feel in control. Of course, judging from medical science and from Sonny's life, this is a false feeling of control, like a false algebra equation.
Sonny feels he will drown in the sea of human suffering that all are subject to--some more so, much more so, than others--and his own personal suffering that threatens to drown him. Sonny espouses the belief, a debatable one, that the only way to learn from suffering, the only way to turn it to something worthwhile is to embrace it. The heroin helps Sonny feel distanced enough to embrace the suffering, albeit at the cost, the high cost, of creating much much more suffering, for himself and those who love him.