Sonny's blues( The story) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Sonny's blues( The story) - Essay Example is darkness through differentiating himself from black people who did not make it out of their miserable lives, but after the death of his loved ones and Sonny’s release from prison, he embraces his darkness through the music that binds the fears, disillusions, and dreams of his fellow black brethren. Before his mother’s death, the narrator has attained his own whiteness, where he rejects the reality of his blackness. When he gets married, he focuses on his family and raising his children. He does not even visit his mother anymore, and he has lost contact with his brother. In a sense, he has left his darkness behind. Being less dark, in other words, being whiter is critical for him because he does not want to be like any other black man. When he reads about his brother being jailed in the papers for drugs, he does not want to accept the truth e: â€Å"I didnt want to believe that Id ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in the condition Id already seen so many others† (Baldwin par. 6). By saying â€Å"others,† he spaces himself from these people. They are not him, and he is not part of them. But after the deaths of his mother and young daughter, the narrator reaches out to his brother, as he becomes more conscious of how his race impacts his social class and identity. His mother knows this, especially after what happened to her husband’s brother. She asks for her eldest to take care of Sonny: â€Å"It aint only the bad ones, nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under† (Baldwin par. 98). She is too painfully aware that being black in itself can push anyone to inner darkness, a darkness that is so deep and entangling that not many can escape it. When the narrator’s daughter died of polio, he realizes that pain intersects them all: â€Å"My trouble made his real† (Baldwin par. 183). From here on, he began piecing his brother together like a puzzle, which helped him understand his own identity too. The narrator