Choose one (1) or two (2) elements to analyze or explore: e.g. Theme and Setting, Two characters to compare and discuss, Irony and Symbolism, etc.

Music is an important form of communication and expression
in the story, and it is the vehicle through which the older brother can understand his
younger brother.  The blues link the brothers—the blues, spirituals, and the songs of
slaves are all part of the jazz pedigree. Early in the story, a boy whistles a
complicated tune, as though he is a bird, recalling for us the nickname of Charlie
Parker.  In the narrator’s memory of his parents seated in church, he highlights “the
jangling beat of a tambourine from one of the churches close by.”  The mother’s story of
the father’s brother includes the fact that the brother had a guitar, sang, and was
whistling on the night he was run down by drunken white men.  The narrator whistles
after he and Sonny fight, and a woman sings before the two of them head off, toward the
end of the story, to Greenwich Village where Sonny plays.  The street music heard from
the revival meeting is the music of spiritual sustenance, and we are told that it
“seemed to soothe the poison out.”

“Sonny’s Blues” is also
a story about drug addiction. The story opens with the narrator’s feeling of ice in his
own veins as he reads about Sonny’s arrest for possession of heroin. Sonny’s friend is
also an addict and is looking for money from the narrator for his next fix. In the scene
before the brothers go to Greenwich Village to hear Sonny play, Sonny says that he needs
drugs to be able to stand “it.” Suffering is seen as a cause of drug addiction, though
the theme of suffering is also tied to the loss of Grace, the narrator’s daughter. The
narrator himself does not fall into drug addiction but certainly comes to a clearer
understanding of Sonny and others who are addicted. The story also has strong
generational ties. Sonny, as he points out in his letter to the narrator, wishes he
could have the faith his mother had. After she tells the story of the father’s brother’s
death on that long, dark road in the past, she says, “I praise my Redeemer.” Without
faith, there seems to be left only music or drugs.

“Sonny’s
Blues” is simply a story of an older brother coming to a greater understanding of his
younger brother—the younger brother whose first words he heard and whom he caught from
falling with his first steps.  The narrator, from the story’s opening, is disturbed and
frightened by the story of his brother’s arrest for heroin that he reads in the
newspaper. The narrator wants to understand his brother, to know about his inner life.
Ultimately, he learns about Sonny through his music, and his brother becomes
“real.”