Sonny's Blues

Alex Hall

Family is a group of people who love each other no matter what happens and always stick by each other’s side. Family doesn’t have to be blood related or grandma or grandpa, it can be a bunch of random people who love each other unconditionally and are always there for each family member. Relationships in family’s can become very confusing and complex. A mother to son relationship is a unique one that the mother loves their son is sometimes very protective of her son. On the other hand, a father to son relationship can be extremely different. The father a lot of the times wants his son to fall in his footsteps and always to be very successful. Fathers aren’t always worried about things mothers worry about so it can sometimes become a split thing on who to necessarily ask which parent for a specific thing. The relationship of sibling-to-sibling is a lot different then parents to their child. Sibling to sibling all really relates to the age and gender. In James Baldwin’s Sunny Blues the relationship is between two brothers. One is older than the other and typically that situation can go either two ways. One is that the younger brother looks up to his older and tries to follow in his footsteps and learns from him. The other situation is the younger brother hates how his brother is so does and acts differently either in good or bad ways. In this case, the narrator’s brother, Sonny, acts differently in a very bad way. The two brothers seem to have a hard time interacting with each other. The background behind why seems reasonable considering Sonny was in jail for heroin, but a relationship within a family should always be a tight bond no matter what. They attempt to talk to each other after awhile of no talking and Sonny’s letter to the narrator made him “feel like a bastard” because it wasn’t what he was expecting. He didn’t know what to expect. After they start talking again you can tell with not much background that things are different between them. They attempt to have a good brother relationship but it just doesn’t work that well. Sonny is very self-centered and doesn’t care that much about that his brother thinks or knows is good for him. They seem to attempt communication and do talk and get things figured out between them, but overall their communication between each other isn’t very successful.