Questions for Close Reading and Analysis of Fictional Elements
Part of "Jazz and Literature"
By Anne Fleischmann and Andy Jones

 

In a three to four page literary analysis essay, respond to one of the following essay questions. Your essay should include an introduction with a strong thesis statement, body paragraphs with clear topic sentences, ample textual support in the forms of quotations and summary, and logical analysis.

1.     Carefully observe the details of the story's opening, how the narrator learns of his brother's downfall, where he is at the time, the interaction with Sonny's friend, etc.  How do these scenes help set up the issues in the story?

2.     How do events in the past, presented as flashbacks or as the narrator's recollections, help to develop the plot and characterization in "Sonny's Blues"?  Consider the narrator's description of his and Sonny's childhood, their lives on the Harlem streets, the Sunday dinners at home, the death of their uncle, the narrator's last conversation with their mother, etc.

3.      Toward the end of the story, as he is trying to explain his addiction to heroin and his passion for music, Sonny tells the narrator that everyone tries to find a way not to suffer, even the narrator himself.  What are the narrator's ways of coping with his pain and fear?

4.     How would you describe the tone of the ending?  What sort of resolution (if any) does the story or the narrator come to?  Does the narrator express optimism?  Pessimism?  Something in between?

5.     Sonny's Blues is populated by images of darkness and light.  Trace a series of these images and discuss how the narrator uses them to create a particular atmosphere and to help tell his story.

6.     A works setting refers to both the time (historical and also time of day or year) and the place (geographical, as in New York, Harlem, Greenwich Village, and also local, as in setting certain scenes in subways, apartments, dark roads, etc.) in which the actions of the story occur.   How do Baldwin's choices about setting help you understand the theme or meaning of the story. 

7.     Look at the following map of Harlem. On page 1696,  the narrator, while speaking with Sonny's childhood friend, says "You come all the way down here just to tell me about Sonny?"  But Sonny has been arrested downtown and the narrator is uptown when he speaks with the friend.  How do you explain this apparent error?

8.     On page 1697, the word "it" populates the conversation between the narrator and the friend.  What is the pronoun standing in for in these sentences?  Where else does the narrator begin to rely on the pronoun "it" to help him make sense of Sonny's story?  (p. 1713) Why do you think Baldwin felt that the word "it" was better than its specific referent in these cases? 

9.  How do the minor characters in the story function to help develop the story, the characters of Sonny and his brother?  (Isabel, Sonny's childhood friend, their parents, their uncle, the jazz musicians at the Village club).

10.  Consider carefully the narrator's language in the climactic scene, when Sonny plays the piano.  What elements of style can you identify here, and what is their effect?  What is the nature of the epiphany the narrator experiences here, and how does it connect with episodes recounted earlier in the story -- e.g. the mother's story of the father and his brother?

11.  What statement does the story make about the relationship of art to life or about the relationship of art to suffering?

12.  Explore the implicit intersections between the effects of drug use, music and religion in Sonny's Blues. 

 

[Return to "Jazz and Literature"]