the road the night Sonny's uncle died, the cries heard by Isabel the day Grace collapsed, the sound of pained determination from Sonny's piano. This darkness was the brothers' redeemer, but they spent half of their lives avoiding it. For Sonny the darkness built up so thick that in his loneliness it drowned him, and the night that the brother agreed to hear Sonny play it built up in the bar as thick as the anguish of Grace's death and slapped the brother across the face. One may ask if the brothers had not attempted to hide from their pain would there be any darkness? But this is how I would reply: To accept that there would be a life without darkness by facing pain that one feels in life would be to forget about darkness' future. Sure, I may face a fear, or deal with a loss, but there is always the future that I cannot control. Even the happiest person carries the blues of being mortal. Even after Sonny wades through the darkness with his brother not far behind, he will not lose his ability to play the blues. Another element, not completely understood in any philosophy, that Sonny adds to the concept of darkness is the idea of others. Outside of the idea of a future, Sonny's blues came from others' darkness. The extent of this ocean alone would supply Sonny with enough darkness to play until the day of eternity. Sonny's new struggle in his maturity is as the openness for others to wade through the darkness. .
The Brother was as guilty as Sonny of concealing pain. For him and many others, the darkness is this denied pain. In bringing himself up in a life that he believed was right, the brother blinded himself from the rest of life and the types of lives others live. His family was what completed the square for him, the upsetting of the box in which he lived by Grace's death was exactly what opened him up to Sonny again after he had left him for life to deal with. In terms of the darkness, Sonny was the rebound from the loss of Grace.
