Buy an essay on “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin

I would like to focus our attention on the story “Sonny’s Blues” written by James Baldwin. This story is an example of two brothers relationships living in a segregated Harlem during the late 1950’s, and it also reflects how people suffered from different problems in their times. It is a story how two brothers became close to each other due blues and how it changed their lives. I’m interested in three features that in my opinion made the story good. First feature is describing of inner feelings, the next is attitude to drugs and fight with painful addiction and the last one – is conflict of narrator with society. All of them make the story interesting and thrilling for readers.
Thinking about the first feature, we could say that inner feelings and main characters’ thoughts allow us to plunge into problem of the story with the more details and feel ourselves involved in described events. For example, looking at the beginning of the story we see that “I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long…” Reading these words, I even felt this cold ice and how it connects me with narrator, because story’s author used interesting epithets in appropriate situations through the story. There are many similar points in the story and all of them made the author’s style unusual and at the same time deep and serious.
The next feature reflects struggle with drug addiction and the author of the story through the narrator’s thoughts and emotions reflects own attitude to this problem. Every year many young people die from drug addiction and the death will never ask name or age of the person whom it decides to take away. It is a really problem that people don’t care of their future and their health and allow to harmful habits and addictions influence on them and change not only their own lives, but also make other people, I mean friends and relatives to suffer from such problem too. Quoting the next words we receive understanding of the problem that it is impossible to run away from then, it is necessary to solve them and fight against them. Baldwin said through one of his characters: “I couldn’t tell you when Mama died-but the reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs. And then, when I ran away, that’s what I was running from-really. When I came back, nothing had changed I hadn’t changed I was just-older.”
Saying about the last one feature, we see that narrator has a conflict with society where he lives, because he always tries to be good and it is impossible to live in such life when there are so many people who suffer from different troubles around you and you are a part of them, because you live among them and share own thoughts, ideas and sufferings with them. It was a wrong idea try to bury feelings to brother and live as nothing strange had happen. I think that through this conflict Baldwin tries to pay our attention on fact of our existence in society and make visible family relationships and connection between people of the same blood and origin.
Thus, we could say for the conclusion that the story is a kind of discovery through human feelings and emotions. I like this story and it allowed me to go through main character’s life not as the reader, but as the witness of all those events.

Work cited:
Baldwin, James. Sonny’s Blues, 1957.