Images of ‘Darkness’ as Inscriptions of Race in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
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A profound sense of despair overwriting the African American experience reverberates throughout James Baldwin’s fiction and essays. While Baldwin is best known for his critical insights into the African American experience as thematized throughout his novels, this paper examines one of his most popularly anthologized short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” as a commentary on the persistence of racial domination in its varied, menacing manifestations. The narrator in “Sonny Blues,” a black high school algebra teacher in Harlem, is presented as equipped with the trappings of middle-class success, and in contradistinction to his younger brother Sonny, a jazz pianist who has even served jail time for trafficking in and using drugs, whom the older brother can only view with disapproval. This paper argues, however, that through images of darkness pervasive throughout the story, Baldwin explores the conditions of black experience—as represented by the narrator Sonny’s older brother—as continually beset by fear, desperation, helplessness, denigration, and death, because of the far from realized American democracy that in fact perpetuates and tolerates black degradation and victimization in the service of white supremacy. While the overarching plot of the story is the narrator’s eventual acceptance of his younger brother and his lifestyle, I argue that “Sonny’s Blues” is not simply about the reconciliation of brotherly differences and conflict. I contend that Baldwin’s narrative is significantly about the story of a black man whose social and emotional separation from his black ghetto community is far from possible due to a critical double- consciousness that frustrates the condition of individual transcendence of race, because of the persistently vicious racial configurations of American society.
Abstract
A profound sense of despair overwriting the African American experience reverberates throughout James Baldwin’s fiction and essays. While Baldwin is best known for his critical insights into the African American experience as thematized throughout his novels, this paper examines one of his most popularly anthologized short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” as a commentary on the persistence of racial domination in its varied, menacing manifestations. The narrator in “Sonny Blues,” a black high school algebra teacher in Harlem, is presented as equipped with the trappings of middle-class success, and in contradistinction to his younger brother Sonny, a jazz pianist who has even served jail time for trafficking in and using drugs, whom the older brother can only view with disapproval. This paper argues, however, that through images of darkness pervasive throughout the story, Baldwin explores the conditions of black experience—as represented by the narrator Sonny’s older brother—as continually beset by fear, desperation, helplessness, denigration, and death, because of the far from realized American democracy that in fact perpetuates and tolerates black degradation and victimization in the service of white supremacy. While the overarching plot of the story is the narrator’s eventual acceptance of his younger brother and his lifestyle, I argue that “Sonny’s Blues” is not simply about the reconciliation of brotherly differences and conflict. I contend that Baldwin’s narrative is significantly about the story of a black man whose social and emotional separation from his black ghetto community is far from possible due to a critical double- consciousness that frustrates the condition of individual transcendence of race, because of the persistently vicious racial configurations of American society.
참고문헌 (17)
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