Literary Criticism Narration About Sonny's Blue (Essay Sample)

CRITICAL RESPONSE TO SONNY’S BLUES
Institution
Name
Tutor
Date


Music, Culture and drugs have interacted together in several conflict heights and harmony throughout the modern day music. It affects the creators as well as the patrons. Sonny’s Blues, a work by James Baldwin, is a portrayal of this cultural relations triangle that has affected at least three America Culture generations. Sonny, the pathless story’s protagonist, finds music as his only way of escaping the society’s black American brutal subjugation in the 1950’s. The brother to Sonny makes a claim, warning Sonny against abusing drugs while referring to drugs Sonny uses in his musical escapes when playing at nightclubs in Greenwich Village as a pianist. In the story, the brother to Sonny makes an inaccurate assumption that Sonny wishes to die; in reality, however, Sonny is merely trying to escape the oppression from the society.
While living with his brother's family, Sonny talks with them in the afternoon, during the night, he talks to his brother alone. Sonny talks about using Heroin. The commentary prior had explained about feeling in control after using drugs when analyzing the singing quartet on the struggles they endured enabling them sing. He refers to the passion and pain in their voices. This assisted in illustrating the conflict during that time. American culture was built around the discrimination and limitation of the black Americans to the inner-city culture. The protagonist, Sonny, was abusing heroin to allow him to feel as if he was in control of what was taking place around him. In reality, however, he was not in any control what so ever. At the time, his ability or path to escape the wretched inner-city life had been blocked by the American culture. When individuals are not given control over their comprehended destiny, they tend to do something that will give them the false feeling of being in control, whether it would be induced through narcotics or real.
Sonny and his sibling had a long talk where they discussed their lives and what they had gone through. The talk brings them to the topic of enduring from economic stress and oppression. They talk about how to deal with and absorb the suffering. The brother to Sonny questions the ability of not suffering in their lives, making Sonny to response, “I believe not…but that’s never stopped anyone from trying…has it?” This clearly exhibits the stance Sonny has taken on the issue of escaping the oppression from the society on the black American Culture. Sonny mixed drugs and music to create an actual pleasure feeling. It also made him feel that he was doing something despite the brutal limits directed on his culture and life. When all the normal routes and options of achieving this feeling are wiped away or blocked, some people only see certain directions to move towards so as to escape. The route for Sonny, to achieve this feeling of ecstasy was the drugs that encircled music and music.
When a culture is entirely interrupted from getting to social levels in the society it belongs to or even receiving similar respect as the rest of the society, people of the oppressed culture still need the feeling of belonging to something greater than what they are actually being treated like. Sonny explains this very vividly showing the role of drugs as the catalyst of this feeling; “…When I was most out of the world, I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play or didn’t have to play, it just came out of me, it was there.” Sonny was only abusing heroin and performing music in order to escape his life of oppression by society. The brother to Sonny escaped the oppression by recruiting in the Army and earned an education allowing him to teach in his home neighborhood of Harlem. The only route Sonny could find was music. The drugs was just a tool Sonny used to feel in control of his situations. In actual sense, it was an excuse that allowed him to be numb to the actual feelings of oppression and brut...