Sonnys blues

Sonny’s Blues” is set in Harlem, a historically African American neighborhood in New York City. Despite the cultural revival known as the Harlem Renaissance, which bloomed in the 1920s, the neighborhood remained impoverished and oppressed in the 1950s when “Sonny’s Blues” takes place. James Baldwin’s birthplace and home for much of his young life, Harlem plays an important role in the short story. Harlem is depicted as a trap from which the narrator and his brother must struggle to escape. Imprisonment becomes a motif in “Sonny’s Blues”: not only is one brother physically jailed during the story but the narrator repeatedly uses the word “trapped” when describing the brothers’ neighborhood.