The characterization.

Like with so many other stories, in “Sonny’s Blues,” the dramatic action mainly concerns the characters’ changes or lack of them. The character changes in “Sonny’s Blues” are particularly interesting, and subtle, in part because the plot features a character’s battle with heroin addiction, and the narrator’s efforts to come to grips with this character’s addiction and recovery.

We might begin thinking about characterization in this story by asking ourselves what we think Baldwin wanted his story to be about, or more specifically, what Baldwin wanted to say about drugs and addiction in his story.

Is “Sonny’s Blues” a story:

* That moralizes against drug use?

* That tries to explain why people become addicted to drugs?

* About a man’s struggle to kick a drug habit?

* About an artist’s struggle to kick a drug habit?

* About the effects of drug use on a family?

* About the ways in which drug use and self-expression can sometimes serve the same purposes.

Of all of the bulleted items above, only the first is wholly unlikely. Not that Baldwin or his characters in “Sonny’s Blues” approve of drug use or advocate it, but the story is far more than simply a cautionary tale warning readers against drugs or exhorting them to “just say no.” In fact, through the characterizations of the brothers, we see that Baldwin wants to illustrate the answers to the other bulleted items. That is, “Sonny’s Blues” helps us to understand the various ways people experience pain and suffering. As a musician and artist, Sonny tries to make known, to speak through his music, the pain he sees around him. Extremely sensitive to that pain himself, Sonny becomes an addict to try to dull his perception of it.

The narrator, on the other hand, denies his own pain and hardship, and that of those around him. But when he is finally forced to see it, he begins to understand Sonny as both an artist and as a recovering addict.

a. Sonny, the artist:

As readers, we realize that our knowledge of Sonny comes only through the narrator, who has acted largely as Sonny’s guardian, a father figure, rather than a brother-peer. The narrator describes Sonny as “wild,” but not “crazy.” He says Sonny had “always been a good boy, he hadn’t ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem.” He compares Sonny to his students: dreamy, disenchanted, and obedient, but struggling against the hopelessness their impoverished lives promise.

Sonny’s one hope is that he can become a musician. Discouraged from that goal by his practical minded brother, Sonny agrees to finish high school living with Isabel’s family, only because the family has a piano. But he cannot change who he is to satisfy their expectations. At some level, the narrator writes, all of the adults understood that “Sonny was at that piano playing for his life.”

When Isabel’s mother discovers Sonny is truant, and “that he’d been down in Greenwich Village, with musicians and other characters in a white girl’s apartment”, she is frightened for him. The ensuing confrontation, in which Sonny realizes that they have not appreciated or understood, but only endured, his efforts to create something from his music, so saddens and angers him that he flees and enlists in the Navy.

This pivotal flashback scene tells us a lot about Sonny and his family. Sonny is desperately trying to express himself, first to his brother when he reveals his aspirations, and then, through his music. Neither the narrator nor Isabel’s family really hear him or understand him: “It was as though Sonny were some sort of god, or monster. He moved in an atmosphere which wasn’t like theirs at all. They fed him and he ate, he washed himself, he walked in and out of their door; he certainly wasn’t nasty or unpleasant or rude, Sonny isn’t any of those things; but it was as though he were all wrapped up in some cloud, some fire, some vision all his own; and there wasn’t any way to reach him.” Perhaps some of you might think that this description suggests that Sonny was already using drugs at this point; people who are under the influence of mind-altering substance are often described in such terms. But we have no hard evidence that suggests that Sonny was already using drugs. In fact, later in the story, Sonny tells his brother that he left Harlem as a teenager to escape the lure of the drugs; thus we can reasonably assume that music was Sonny’s only drug at this time, his only way of expressing his hopes and dulling his pain. Rather than seeing Sonny’s difference here as evidence of a drug altered mind, we should see Baldwin as simply depicting a sensitive, artistic mind and how it expresses what it perceives. Sonny has a radically different world view than that of the narrator and Isabel’s family, who are frightened of the disorder, uncertainty, and suffering his artistic nature represents. Sonny wants to confront his pain and those of others like him, while the narrator wants to deny it.

Because he is arrested for drug use, goes to prison, kicks his drug habit, and returns to society to live with his brother, we may think of Sonny as the character who changes the most in the story. In fact, it would be easy to assume, after a cursory reading of the story, that Sonny, the addict, is the character who must change. But Sonny’s attempts to change are not really the focus of the story. Readers never glimpse Sonny “high,” or actively struggling with his addiction; we meet him only after he’s served prison time and come home clean. We also never find out whether he continues to maintain control over his addiction. Therefore, we might conclude that to Baldwin, the questions of how Sonny became addicted and how or whether he reformed are secondary. More important to Baldwin is how the narrator changes as he begins to listen to and understand Sonny.

b. The narrator:

The narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” is an upstanding man. He’s a dutiful son to his parents, and a caring husband and father. He has worked hard to attain the trappings of middle-class success. Up until Sonny’s arrest, he has tried not to think about things that bother him. It’s logical that the narrator would exhibit this particular trait, as his parents have set a good example for him by not telling him and Sonny about their uncle’s murder by a group of drunken white men. Certainly the boys had felt the effects of their father’s great sorrow − the father appears to have been an alcoholic himself, as “he died suddenly, during a drunken weekend” − but the root of this sorrow had never been spoken in their family.

Because of this generational silence, Sonny grows up virtually alone. Though the narrator and his parents are physically there for most of Sonny’s childhood, they never really hear him or listen to him. After Sonny returns from military service, the narrator begins to harbor unspoken suspicions about Sonny’s lifestyle and the brothers fight whenever they see each other. As we saw in the scene where the narrator discourages Sonny from becoming a musician, he refuses to accept Sonny for who he is: “I didn’t like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time, and I didn’t like his friends, and his music seemed to be merely an excuse for the life he led. It sounded just that weird and disordered.” We might understand this reaction if the narrator were disapproving the drug use. But notice how the brother never explicitly articulates his fear that Sonny is a drug addict. In fact, we know from the opening paragraphs that the brother has always pushed that realization aside, never allowing himself to believe it. Only when he reads about Sonny “being picked up for peddling and using heroin” does the narrator accept the facts: “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 long time. I hadn’t wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I didn’t name them, I kept putting them away.” Thus, we get a picture here of the narrator as shutting Sonny out, not because just he’s a drug addict, but because he can’t face pain and uncertainty of the way Sonny lives.

The narrator does as many of us might do, were we to walk in his shoes. Afraid of the dangers or misfortune that might befall him, he tries to keep safe. But in trying always to stay safe, the narrator is always afraid. The story opens with the narrator feeling an icy dread as he reads about Sonny in the paper. Images of darkness surround him in the subway; he feels “trapped in the darkness that roared outside.” In the first flashback to his childhood, he remembers family gatherings on Sunday afternoons not with warmth and nostalgia, but with a recollection of silence and a darkness that settles over everything. He says,

“The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

The narrator as a child and now as an adult has tried to ignore or deny those feelings of dread and despair because he is afraid of them. But Sonny has tried through his blues music to face them. Sonny doesn’t understand his brother’s fearful reaction, just as the narrator doesn’t understand Sonny’s drug use as a way of coping with his terror. Sonny accuses the narrator of “sound[ing] so − scared” at the thought of Sonny becoming a musician.

The narrator begins to end his silence toward Sonny and to try to understand Sonny’s pain when his own daughter dies. “My trouble,” he says, “made his real.” We see here the narrator beginning to appreciate not only Sonny’s experience, but also the meaning and purpose of blues music, the music he had scoffed at and dismissed when Sonny first mentioned to him his interest in it. A blues musician sings of his sorrow and trouble; listeners are transformed, and their pain is at least momentarily assuaged when they hear another’s blues.

The narrator begins to realize the importance of breaking his silence toward Sonny and sharing his own feelings and receiving Sonny’s.

c. The story’s final scenes and how they develop the narrator’s changes:

In the pivotal penultimate scene of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator agrees to go with Sonny to the jazz club and the brothers finally talk about Sonny’s addiction. This scene is pivotal because it demonstrates the extent of the narrator’s changes, particularly when compared with the flashback of the narrator’s last conversation with his mother. In the flashback scene, the narrator is cautioned by his mother: “You got to hold onto your brother…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, you hear?”. In this scene, the narrator perfunctorily promises: “I won’t let nothing happen to Sonny.” His mother smiles as if amused at his naiveté. She knows he can’t prevent Sonny’s struggles, but she wants the narrator to be there for Sonny, to help him get through life by listening to him. In almost the next sentence, the narrator admits that once he left for the war, he “pretty well forgot [his] promise to Mama.” What we understand, though, when we see how the narrator interacts with Sonny, is not so much that he’s forgotten his promise, but that he’s never really understood that promise or what his mother was asking him to do. As a man who denies or tries to ignore what frightens him, what makes him uncomfortable, and what he doesn’t understand, he has believed that “taking care” of Sonny means trying to get Sonny to live the way he does. When this strategy doesn’t work, he essentially breaks his promise to his mother and gives up on Sonny, letting years pass between their meetings.

In the penultimate scene, the narrator shows how far he’s come since Sonny has come back into his life. As we’ve discussed previously, here the brothers discuss the nature of suffering and how different people try to overcome it – through song, or art, through drug use, and through denial. Here the narrator begins to see that his way – denial – is not effective. The narrator thinks to himself that he wants to reassure Sonny that with “will power” he can conquer his addiction, that “life could be – well, beautiful,” and that he “would never fail him again”. But the narrator finally realizes here that these promises, because they deny and ignore Sonny’s true nature and needs, would have been “empty words and lies,” like his first forgotten promise to his mother. Instead of making these promises publicly, then, the narrator “made the promise to [him]self and prayed that [he] would keep it.”

He begins right away to keep his promise as Sonny describes his loneliness and alienation.

“It’s terrible sometimes, inside,” he said, “that’s what’s the trouble. You walk these streets, black and funky and cold, and there’s not really 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’s use of the pronoun “you” in the speech above is generic; that is, he is referring to himself and to addicts and artists in general. But he is also exhorting the narrator himself to listen, and the narrator does. He draws Sonny out for the first time, asking him “What have you been, Sonny?”

Sonny’s response describes the worst moments of his drug addiction, the way in which heroin seemed to promise a way “to listen” to himself and to what he, as an artist, wanted to say about his world. But as his addiction tightened its grip on him, Sonny realized that its promises (like those of the narrator) were really just false promises that drove him to depths he hadn’t imagined. He ends his speech by warning his brother (and himself) that his dependence on heroin “can come again.” In the narrator’s response, we see how far the narrator has come: “‘All right,’ I said, at last. ‘So it can come again, All right’” Here, the narrator finally accepts that Sonny’s addiction needs to be faced before it can be dealt with, that Sonny will continue to struggle with it and with his artistic goals and temperament. To truly help Sonny, the narrator must accept this bitter battle and fight it with Sonny. As the scene ends, Sonny has turned, as if toward a lodestone (a magnetized stone used by sailors to find their way on the sea), to the window that looks out onto the Harlem street. The lodestone image suggests that Sonny is and will be continually drawn to street life, to explaining the sorrows of the people. The scene ends with Sonny expressing his main concern, the wonder that motivates his music: “‘All that hatred down there,’ he said, ‘all that hatred and misery and love. It’s a wonder it doesn’t blow the avenue apart’.

The narrator’s realization that he must accept Sonny as he is sets the stage for the narrator’s first trip to the nightclub where Sonny has played. Here he meets Sonny’s musician friends, who appreciate Sonny in a way the narrator never has, as a “real musician”. The tables are turned on the narrator and he begins to understand the value of jazz and blues music. Rather than trying to make Sonny fit into his world, he is now “in Sonny’s world. Or, rather: his kingdom. Here it was not even a question that his veins bore royal blood”.

In the ensuing scene the narrator begins to understand the language of jazz music, the way in which it helps artists express their torment and their fear. As he describes the musical scene, the narrator uses another analogy of the sea, with its threatening deep water.

[The band leader Creole] was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing – he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

Thus, as Creole tries to get Sonny to put everything into his music, to really express a true emotion, to abjure his fear, the narrator himself finally sees the benefit of such risk-taking. He learns

“…what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were 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 tale 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.”

Thus, music has a communal function; it tells the stories of a community of people, it evokes feelings in performers and in listeners, helping them to heal from the misfortunes of their lives or to at least find solace in the company of others who are similarly afflicted. The narrator sees that “Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others”. The music makes the narrator remember the tragedies that befell his parents, the death of his own daughter and the sorrow of his wife, and he is moved to tears as he feels the power of the music to evoke his own pain. Somehow, this experience is transformative, helping the narrator to see into himself at the same time as he connects with Sonny and the other nightclub patrons.

We might wonder about the final image of the story in which waitress puts a “Scotch and milk on top of the piano for Sonny”.

We might wonder whether a recovering heroin addict should be drinking an alcoholic beverage.

And what, we might wonder, is the “cup of trembling”? This biblical allusion is to Isaiah 51: 17-22, which reads as follows:

17. Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.
18. There is none to guide her among all the sons whom she hath brought forth; neither is there any that taketh her by the hand of all the sons that she hath brought up.
19. These two things are come unto thee; who shall be sorry for thee? desolation, and destruction, and the famine, and the sword: by whom shall I comfort thee?
20. Thy sons have fainted, they lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net: they are full of the fury of the LORD, the rebuke of thy God.
21. Therefore hear now this, thou afflicted, and drunken, but not with wine:
22. Thus saith thy Lord the LORD, and thy God that pleadeth the cause of his people, Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again:
23. But I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; which have said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over: and thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over.

In these passages, God tells the Israelites that He knows they have suffered His fury that they have been afraid of his wrath and of their enemies (“drunken the dregs of the cup of trembling”). God promises here that they will no longer drink from the cup of trembling or feel His wrath and that the cup of trembling will instead be put into the hands of their enemies. As an allusion at the end of the story, this passage implies hope that those, like Sonny and his brother, who have been afflicted with fear and suffering, will no longer be tormented.

As you can see, the passage’s images of drunkenness and of the street resonate with the plot and setting of Sonny’s Blues. In the Biblical passage, God speaks to those “afflicted, and drunken, but not with wine” (verse 21) and promises to assuage their pain by taking away the cup of trembling. Sonny’s drink is likened to a “cup of trembling” which he sips from as he plays. This seems an ambiguous image. Baldwin may be saying that the artist/musician can never escape the “cup of trembling,” that his music depends on feeling, understanding and expressing the fear and sorrow of his people. Or, Baldwin may be saying that Sonny, in taking from the cup of trembling himself, allows his listeners to abstain; that is, his suffering translated into music inoculates his audience from feeling the same depths of suffering. We might see a connection here to the last verse of the Biblical passage: The artist is he who “hast laid [his] body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over.”

Taking the analogy further, we can see that, as the artist, Sonny performs a sort of sacrifice; he internalizes and then expresses all of the anguish and joy of his listeners, as though he were laying his body down for them to walk over from a stormy emotional state to a place of peace and contentment. Don’t miss the religious, Christ-like implications of this depiction of the artist’s sacrifice.

Another very persuasive interpretation of the final image of the drink appears in the article “Words and Music: Narrative Ambiguity in ‘Sonny’s Blues.’” Here, Keith Byerman comments on this final ambiguous image. He writes that the Scotch and milk drink is “an emblem of simultaneous destruction and nurture to the system; it cannot be reduced to one or the other. Sonny’s acceptance of it indicates that he will continue on the edge between the poison of his addiction and the nourishment of his music” (371).