Discussion Topic

Suffering's Role in Life and Art in "Sonny's Blues"

Summary:

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," art, specifically music, serves as a powerful means of expressing and alleviating suffering. The story highlights how Sonny uses blues and jazz to cope with his despair, illustrating the transformative power of art. This music not only allows Sonny to express his emotions but also helps him transcend his struggles. Through Sonny's journey, Baldwin suggests that art can connect individuals, providing a shared understanding and potential relief from life's hardships, emphasizing the resilience of the human spirit.

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What does "Sonny's Blues" imply about the relationship between life and art?

It is intriguing that the title of James Baldwin's story can be read two ways: "Sonny's Blues" can mean the music that Sonny plays, or it can mean his depression, his "blues," or state of discontent and unhappiness. This same duality exists with the term "the blues." For, the Blues is a uniquely American music that originated with the English expression "the blue devils," a term derived from the seventeenth century that described the intense hallucinations that might result from severe alcohol withdrawal. Over time, the term changed to "the blues,"meaning a state of depression or agitation. This music began in the Deep South and it expressed the feelings of those who composed and sang it. Truly, the Blues speak to the soul; there is, indeed, a link between this art form and life, a link that connects with the spirit of those who play and sing it, and those who listen.

Critic John M. Reilly observes that "Sonny's Blues" both depicts and demonstrates the conviction that the "artful expression of personal yet typical experience is one way to freedom." Art, then, acts as a conduit for the expression of the soul that can unite with others and therefore, create meaning for the individual. Music connects others because it speaks to the soul and heart of man. As the brother observes Sonny cross the street, he notes that his brother has a slow, loping stride much like Harlem hipsters; however, he has "imposed on this his own half-beat." After Sonny enters the house, he glances out the window at a street singer to whom he had been listening. Later, he comments about listening to that woman,

"...it struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through--to sing like that....No, there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem--well, like you."

Even further in the narrative, Sonny invites his brother to accompany him to a nightclub where he will be performing. As the brother sits in the dark waiting for Sonny to come onstage, he reflects upon the "personal, private, vanishing evocations" that most people experience as they hear music.  But, he adds,

...the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air.What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours.

By listening to Sonny's music, the brother apprehends his own history and traditions--his own essence, an essence much like that of his brother. Music, as art, speaks to the soul, and as it does, it heals the soul and "imposes order" with its redemptive powers. Exemplifying this message to the soul that brings with it an empathy and restorative order is even the form of Baldwin's story that of itself has a musicality in its sentence rhythms, crescendos of recurring motifs, and "half-beats." Sherley Ann Williams writes that 

Music is the medium through which the musician achieves enough understanding and strength to deal with the past and present hurt.

Just as Creole "hit something in all of them" at the nightclub, so does Baldwin "hit" something in his readers, too.

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What is the message about suffering in "Sonny's Blues" according to Baldwin?

"Suffering" is one of the main themes of "Sonny's Blues," by James Baldwin.

Baldwin may be pointing out that there are many kinds of suffering, and that one person's suffering is not necessarily harder or easier than another person's: it is all relative. Sometimes we may, as a part of the human condition, feel that our suffering is harder to bear than that of another, but how can we ever know, and does it matter?

In Baldwin's story, suffering affects the lives of the narrator and his family. A car filled with drunken white men ran down the narrator's uncle. His death haunts the narrator's father—brother to the dead man. In fact, the father becomes so hardened by his suffering, that he hates white people.

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 just having fun, they just wanted to scare him, the way they do sometimes, you know. But they was drunk.

The narrator's father is never the same. He carries his suffering with him everyday. His mother also suffers—in watching her husband's pain:

I ain't saying it to throw no flowers at myself...it keeps me from feeling too cast down to know I helped your father get safely through this world. Your father always acted like he was the roughest, strongest man on earth. And everybody took him to be like that.  But if he hadn't had me there—to see his tears!

She suffers, too, trying to make a life for her family in Harlem, and feeling that Sonny is more fragile than his brother. She tells the narrator, the older brother:

"You got to hold on to your brother," she said, "and don't let him fall, no matter what it looks like is happening to him and no matter how evil you gets with him. You going to be evil with him many a time. But don't you forget what I told you..."

Soon after, she dies. It's difficult to imagine the intensity of a mother's suffering for her child—but, again, Baldwin is not suggesting that this is an easier or more difficult kind of suffering— it's one of many kinds.

Sonny suffers with addiction—and over his music.

"But we just agreed," I said, "that there's no way not to suffer. Isn't it better, then, just to—take it?"

"But nobody just takes it," Sonny cried, "that's what I'm telling you! Everybody tries not to. You're just hung up on the way some people try—it's not your way!"

And then Sonny speaks of the need to play:

"Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your mother's throat." He laughed and looked at me. "Or your brother's." Then he sobered. "Or your own."

The narrator suffers when he thinks of his students, knowing the potential for drug abuse and death hover so close to the school. He suffers, too, because he does not understand Sonny's need to play jazz. He doesn't understand jazz. He doesn't understand Sonny at all...until he hears Sonny play the blues.

...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... Then he began to make it his...it was no longer a lament...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.

And so Baldwin says there are many kinds of suffering, but perhaps, too, he notes that if we share each other's suffering, we can help to alleviate that suffering and perhaps set each other free.

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What does "Sonny's Blues" suggest about the relationship of art to life or suffering?

James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" certainly illustrates the fact that the artistic expression of an individual is an expression of the human condition.  In addition, it is through this artistic expression that human emotions are both expressed and relieved; for the arts, indeed, are what feed the soul.

Since under the influence of heroin he felt that he was "in control," Sonny used this drug to seek refuge from the angst of living in the "vivid killing streets" of Harlem and the darkness and chaos of his environment. However, after his arrest he has to find release from his suffering in his music.  When it is "repulsive" to Sonny that the woman holding a revival on the street has had to "suffer so much to sing that well," his brother empathizes by stating that everyone must suffer, for it is the human condition.

With this understanding growing between the brothers, Sonny invites his sibling to the club where he will play the piano.  There Creole, who acts as a surrogate brother, evokes in Sonny the triumph over his suffering through "Sonny's blues."  Thus, Sonny's music helps him to "deal with the void" and "release the storm within him."  As he sits in a dark corner, the brother reaches an epiphany about the relationship of Sonny's music to his suffering:

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 Sonny, music is his expression of and triumph over suffering; it is his "cup of trembling" that brings him surcease from the angst of the darkness of life.

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What does "Sonny's Blues" reveal about the nature of art and artists?

In the conclusion of the short story "Sonny's Blues," first Sonny and then the narrator reveal author James Baldwin's theory about suffering in relationship to art and expression, specifically the art of blues music playing as Sonny plays it. Sonny tells his brother, the narrator, that music keeps Sonny from drowning in a sea of suffering.

He further says that he believes (being the voice of the author at that moment) that in order to profit from suffering, in order to learn from it, one has to make it your own, which Sonny has attempted to do through heroine and music (the results of such "owning" through heroine and music might be very arguable indeed). Music and its expression--or art and its expression--allow Sonny to feel in control of the suffering drowning him--an illusionary feeling at best considering the results and circumstances of Sonny's decisions and life.

Then, while the narrator watches Sonny at his reunion performance, he realizes that the blues has helped Sonny keep his sense of worth and identity and, in fact to build more worth and identity, in the midst of the suffering. The narrator expresses the author's theory that self can be preserved, even amplified, through art and the expression of art, even when suffering seeks to crush it.

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