Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin is a story in which the narrator struggles to come to grip with his brother’s heroin addiction as well as his lifestyle as a Jazz musician. The narrator having escaped the streets of Harlem goes through life ignoring the things in life that bother him, until one day his daughter dies and he is forced to acknowledge his brother. In Sonny’s Blues the narrator changes in many ways throughout the story, he goes from criticizing and admonishing the way his brother lives to listening to his brothers struggles, acknowledging his addiction, and gaining a deeper understanding of his own suffering in life through listening to Sonny and his music.

From the beginning, when Sonny first tells his brother that he wishes to become a jazz pianist, his brother criticizes and distrusts his brother’s choice. “Doesn’t all this take a lot of time? Can you mak

In summary, Sonny’s Blues is chiefly about the struggle of one man to listen to and accept his brother. Changing throughout the story the narrator starts off ostracizing his brother for life he chooses, but gradually the narrator learns to listen to his brother and accept him for who he is. Having listened to his brother play the narrator no longer thinks of his music as “weird and disordered” but as a way for his brother to cope with life.

e a living at it?” says the narrator. Sonny’s brother clearly doesn’t want him to become a jazz musician. The narrator’s dislike of his brother’s lifestyle is even more apparent later on in the story when Sonny visits him at his house, the narrator comments “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 and excuse for the life he led”. Th

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