What is the Epiphany in Sonny's Blues? In the nightclub, the narrator has several epiphanies about his brother and their relationship by watching him play. The first epiphany is that music is Sonny's voice in the world. When Sonny tells him in their younger days that he wants to pursue music, his brother shuts down the idea quickly.
What kind of story is Sonny's Blues? The story opens with the unnamed narrator reading about a heroin bust resulting in the arrest of a man named Sonny. Why is the narrator in Sonny's Blues unnamed?
The unnamed narrator is important to the story not just because it's through his perspective that we get the narrative, but also because he provides us with an alternative view of Sonny's life.
It's almost necessary that we hear the story from the narrator, since Sonny would have been an unreliable narrator himself. What happened to Sonny's uncle? The narrator's uncle was tragically killed at a young age when a car full of drunken white men ran him over. The incident permanently traumatized the narrator's father, witness to his brother's untimely death.
Who is Sonny's favorite musician? At the same time that the art scene in New York was exploding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem, where, instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, they found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums.
Sonny and his brother both serve in the war, and each returns to find a radically different life in America. The civil rights movement, which had begun in the South early in the decade, had quickly begun to spread across the country as millions of African Americans began to agitate for equal rights. This is a position many of us find ourselves in when we're in high school.
We still have to listen to our parents, teachers, coaches, etc. It can be so frustrating when we don't get to express those or feel that they're not taken seriously. This is exactly what happens with Sonny. His brother doesn't understand his desire to be a musician or why he'd want to join the military before finishing school. Sonny feels constrained on a bunch of levels, and we think this is a pretty common thing to face as young adults.
We also think this is one of the reasons you should care about this story. Most of us don't turn to drugs to escape these feelings and we certainly don't advocate or justify Sonny's choice to do so , but many of us probably do struggle to figure out how to deal with them.
He's a guy who makes some really bad decisions when trying to deal with his own suffering. In that way, the story is about being young and misunderstood.
And you know that feeling, right? But it's also a cautionary tale about how the decisions we make now both good and bad can affect us for a long, long time. Ken Burns' "Jazz" Burns is a documentary filmmaker who did an amazing series on the history of jazz.
This website accompanies the PBS series. But after the narrator's daughter dies of polio , he feels compelled to reach out to Sonny. When Sonny is released from prison, he moves in with his brother's family.
After a couple of weeks, Sonny invites the narrator to come to hear him play piano at a nightclub. The narrator accepts the invitation because he wants to understand his brother better. At the club, the narrator begins to appreciate the value of Sonny's music as a response to suffering and he sends over a drink to show his respect.
Throughout the story, darkness is used to symbolize the threats that menace the African-American community. When the narrator discusses his students, he says:. As his students approach adulthood, they realize how limited their opportunities will be. The narrator laments that many of them may already be using drugs, just as Sonny did, and that perhaps the drugs will do "more for them than algebra could.
As the narrator and Sonny ride in a cab toward Harlem — "the vivid, killing streets of our childhood" — the streets "darken with dark people. He notes that:. Though both Sonny and the narrator have traveled the world by enlisting in the military, they have both ended up back in Harlem. And though the narrator in some ways has escaped the "darkness" of his childhood by getting a respectable job and starting a family, he realizes that his children are facing all the same challenges he faced.
His situation doesn't seem much different from that of the older people he remembers from childhood. The sense of prophecy here — the certainty of "what's going to happen" — shows a resignation to the inevitable.
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