Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Interpretation
Interpretation
Sonny’s Blues, a short story by James Baldwin is about the struggle of a man who grew up in Harlem in the 1950’s. The story opens with Sonny’s brother, a teacher at a local school narrating his thoughts. He has just read the paper on his brother’s condition and discovered that Sonny isn’t doing well. He is in distress and explains his emotions… “I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a ling time. I hadn’t wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I didn’t name them, I kept putting them outside me. I kept putting them away.” He is explaining his denial of Sonny’s condition. He had disregarded Sonny’s state and now had to come to terms with it in full force. Sonny was a heroin addict. The story picks up a few months later when the narrator’s daughter dies from Polio. Finally after feeling his own pain he can imagine the pain Sonny must be feeling and decides to write him stating that until then he had not known what to say or how to say it. Sonny writes back immediately and states, “Dear brother, you do not know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn’t write. But now I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside…”
After the icebreaker of their first letters, the two brothers continued to write back and forth until they could meet when Sonny came back to New York. He writes of the fears of seeing his brother for the first time and the tension that was present as they took their first cab ride together through the streets that they had grown up on. Upon arriving at the house the brothers pick up an awkward relationship of worrying about stepping on one another’s toes and what to and what not to say. Sonny is an introvert, very kind and sincere, but very much inside himself. His brother is concerned for Sonny and just wants to protect him and be a good big brother as his mother has requested before she died. Sonny’s brother reflects on the time him and his mother had this conversation and how she shared about the two men’s father’s brother that had died at a young age. She said that she did not want that to happen to Sonny and she said, “You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there.” After she dies Sonny, still a teen, has to go live at Isabel’s home with her parents. Sonny begins to practice the piano because of his passion to play jazz. He plays day in and day out as if it’s his lifeline. Eventually Isabel’s mother and him get in a fight about Sonny missing school and she supposedly told him “what a sacrifice they were making to give Sonny a decent home and how little he appreciated it.” Sonny left after this to join the navy and somewhere between the navy and the article in the newspaper explaining Sonny’s condition Sonny became an avid jazz piano musician and a druggie. The narrator then jumps back to the present day where Sonny and he are talking and Sonny says, “It’s terrible sometimes, inside. That’s what’s the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there’s really not a living ass to talk to, 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.” Sonny is talking about the turmoil inside him and his desire to get away from his addictions. Sonny asks his brother to go with him to a local bar where Sonny is going to play the piano again for the first time in over a year. The brother realizes the intensity of this situation because Sonny is used to getting high when playing music. They arrive at the bar and one of Sonny’s old friends Creole greats him with a big hug. There are many people at the bar and it is obvious “his veins were royal blood.” The band got on stage to play and Sonny was timid at first. Jazz is an improvisation of music and so the band was trying to work together. Sonny’s brother views the band and takes in Creole helping Sonny. “He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.” Sonny began to play and soon “he and his boys were up there keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tail 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.” Sonny has told his story.
Sonny’s Blues is a bit difficult to interpret and understand because the wording Sonny’s brother uses when describing jazz music and the intensity of Sonny’s desire to play it seems strange. As the story is read for the first time it seems like the music is just a passion of Sonny’s, but after reading and contemplating the jazz it is obvious that it is all Sonny has to express himself.
The story is about taking music and turning it into a symbol of each person’s individual desire to express themselves, their emotions, and to be understood. Sonny’s brother says that, “Now these are Sonnys blues… Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.” When Creole was assisting Sonny on stage he was helping him to communicate and find himself again through his music. Finally Sonny had it, he could play without the use of drugs. He could communicate his feelings while sober and that meant everything, Sonny’s life was on the line and he had found it. When Sonny finally speaks for himself through improvising on the piano, it proves that he will make it in the rough water.
I think Sonny’s Blues is important for everyone to understand because it conveys the importance of finding oneself. For some people jazz music is not their way of expression. It may be through art, dancing, cooking, story-telling, or any other activity, but the important part is to find oneself through that activity and share it with others just like Sonny does through his jazz music.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
symbolism
In literature, there are many forms of symbolism. In our Introduction to Literature class we have covered many stories containing symbolism. The Onion, a short poem on the history of an onion we discover that the onion has come a long way and does not get the credit it deserves. The author is obviously not talking about the onion. She must be talking about something deeper and it is up to the reader to decide. As a Christian we consider that she is talking about Jesus Christ. He went through so much and often gets no credit. Many “Christ-followers” do not continually grasp what He has done for us. Another example of symbolism is Sonney’s Blues. In the story the music is so important, but is it possible that the jazz music is more than just music? Maybe the music represents each person’s individual desire to express themselves and to be understood.
Regardless of what is interpreted through a story, the author desires for it to be deeper than merely an onion or music. The definition of symbolism is a word that stands for something else. “It is something (an object, a word, an image) that is used to suggest a range of associations or feelings.”
Symbolism is a great way for an author to express something that they cannot really put their finger on. It is a way of telling a story inside of a story. When they want to get a point across, but it just doesn’t seem to come out right, they can use symbolism. The Bible is full of symbolism and I think it conveys much more than would be able to be told if it were done in a matter of fact way.
