Homework Clinic
Social Science Clinic => English => Topic started by: ss2343 on Jul 20, 2018
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Reread the last four paragraphs and explain the significance of the statement Now these are Sonnys blues. How has Sonny made this music his own?
What will be an ideal response?
Question 2
The major characters in this story are called Mama, Daddy, and Sonny (the older brother is never named or even nicknamed). How do these names affect our sense of the story?
What will be an ideal response?
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Answer to Question 1
- The outer story of Sonnys Blues is the title characters rehabilitation from drug addiction, reconciliation with his estranged brother, and recognition as a jazz pianist. The final scene in the nightclub ends with a religious vision of the blues. Listening to the group leader, Creole, play, the narrator says:
He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were 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 isnt any other tale to tell, and its the only light weve got in all this darkness (par. 234).
That passage not only offers as good an explanation of the blues and jazz as one is likely to find anywhere; it speaks cogently on the purpose of all art. It is worth reading out loud in class and having students pause over it.
The final scene of Sonnys Blues is set in a dark, smoky nightclub, and its lyric quality marks a noticeable shift in tone from the realistic narrative style that preceded it. As the closing episode gains force along with the music it describes, it becomes a kind of vision for the narrator. In intellectual terms (for, after all, the narrator is a reflective math teacher), the vision brings him to a deep understanding of the human importance of art and the terrible cost of its creation. In emotional terms, his comprehension of jazz is inseparable from his sudden and profound understanding of Sonnys identity and motivations as an artist.
The blues have indeed become Sonnys as he is finally able to use his artistic talent to give voice to his pain, thereby reaching out to his elder brother, who is grieving the death of his young daughter. This moment of connection is profoundly important to the character development for both brothers. In one sense, the whole story is a kind of blues composition, as both Sonny and his brother have the blues. They both have it and live it. The final image of the Scotch and milk suggest that, for the first time, the brothers will finally play the bluesin different waysfor the first time.
Unless the reader can accept the narrators capacity for this transforming insight, the story is flawed by the sudden change of tone at the end. Several critics have expressed their problem with the conclusion. They feel that Baldwins authorial voice has replaced the narrators. As Joseph Featherstone said in an initial review of Going to Meet the Man, the volume in which Sonnys Blues first appeared:
The terms seem wrong; clearly this is not the voice of Sonny or his brother, it is the intrusive voice of Baldwin the boy preacher who has turned his back on the store front tabernacles but cannot forget the sound of angels wings beating around his head. (New Republic, 27 Nov. 1965, reprinted in Kenneth Kinnamons Twentieth Century Views collection, cited in Resources below.)
On one level, Featherstones criticism makes sense. The tone of the final scene is elevated and religious. It is quite unlike the narrators opening voice. However, a reader wrapped up in the power of the final scene is entitled to respond that the entire story up until then exists to justify this passage. Sonnys Blues is not merely the story of the narrators experiences; it is the tale of his inner transformation. The final scene is the demonstration of the older brothers spiritual growth, which his earlier experiences of death and loss have motivated. In understanding and accepting Sonny, he has enlarged his soul enough to understand Sonnys life and music, too.
Answer to Question 2
- The names are generic, which allows the reader to place his or her family in the story. Generic names allow us to focus on the characters as family members, tied to each other irrevocably. In this sense, the story can represent any family that suffers a particularly tragic event and its universal truths resonante.