The abiding theme of light v darkness is given a distinctly religious twist in Sonny's Blues. It's instructive in this regard that Sonny's face is bathed in light after he attends a church service during his childhood. The illumination of Sonny's face reflects the inner light that glows deep within his God-intoxicated soul.
Light doesn't just represent everything that's good and positive; it also stands for salvation and grace. Those who experience a profound religious conversion often say that they've seen the light, and one can certainly say the same about Sonny as he basks in the warm, comforting afterglow of a particularly uplifting church service.
By the same token, all the various elements of darkness in the story such as drug abuse, poverty, and racism, are not just negatives; they are symbols of a deep, underlying evil that threatens to overwhelm humanity at any moment, and must therefore...
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constantly be resisted.
That's pretty much the story of Sonny's life in a nutshell. At every twist and turn he's engaged in a titanic struggle against the forces of evil, his soul torn in two different directions at once. To some extent, his numerous struggles can be seen as an attempt, however forlorn, to return to the path of righteousness and innocence he once occupied when he was a young boy.
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," there is a revival taking place as the narrator looks out his living room window of his house. This scene is pivotal to the plot. For, when the woman with the tambourine is
divided by very little from the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped lips, ...her face scarred and swollen from many beatings, and her black eyes glittering like coal. Perhaps they both knew this, which was why, when, as rarely, they addressed each other, they addressed each other as Sister.
This religious encounter presages the redemptive realization of the narrator that he and Sonny are brothers; he senses that he must accept Sonny's invitation to come hear him play that evening. Furthering the understanding between the brothers is Sonny's telling the narrator that the singer's voice reminded him of what heroin feels like,
It makes you feel sort of warm and cool...And distant And--sure.
As the brothers talk, Sonny explains that the heroin "makes something real..." out of the suffering. The narrator tells Sonny, "But there's no way not to suffer." Sonny agrees, but wishes that people would listen.
On the night that Sonny plays, the narrator truly does listen:
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.
It is then that the narrator sees the drink for Sonny as "the very cup of trembling" that Isaiah tells of in the Bible. This cup, much like the cup that Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane asks to have passed from him, represents suffering. At that moment, Sonny's suffering is lifted from him in his music and with those who listen. Sonny's blues can help him to be true to what he is.