A Child's Overture: Suffering in Sonny's Blues Anonymous College

Humans are made of the tangible; flesh and blood, muscles and bones, cells and nerves. The survival of man can be dissected into the purely scientific, the emotionless, the artless. The value of the anatomical can clearly not be understated, as such is the basest foundation of existence. However, when unaccompanied by that which offers grace and solace, joy and purpose, and, above all else, love and understanding, this foundation grants only that: existence. A limp, dispassionate meandering through life at it’s most stripped bare is a weak prospect, and yet it is the only one facing the character of Sonny in James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues, should he follow in the wake of his older brother.

While there are those who condemn Sonny’s drug use as an exemplification of pathetic weakness, it is much more than that; it is the overture of a child in the dark, grasping at a flicker of light which he knows to be false, but he grasps at anyway because he so desperately needs something to clutch in his otherwise empty fist. Sonny is not the same as his older brother; his soul is not the same. Sonny has an artist’s soul, an artist’s suffering. Baldwin delineates Sonny as a character who does not have an alternative to drugs, as a tragic...