Suppressing the Blues

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” deals with two brothers, searching for their identities in a brutal society and their ability to understand themselves. The narrator, Sonny’s brother, tries to pass his wisdom on to Sonny, suggesting staying in school and discouraging him from becoming a musician. Though their lives may have gone down two different paths, the brothers soon discover their lives are not as different as they thought. The narrator must first however grasp his disdain for Sonny’s chosen lifestyle.

The narrator, as a schoolteacher, lives a completely separate life from Sonny. Baldwin begins the story as the older brother reads the newspaper headline showing Sonny arrested for possession of heroin. As he reflection on the article he thought, “It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that…at the same time I couldn’t doubt it…A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting the slowly all day long…sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out…This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had said or done” (Baldwin 79). Upon learning of Sonny’s arrest a dreadful shock and sorrow overcomes the narrator, the “icy” feeling, and he attempts to deaden his concern for his brother’s future.

After the narrator finishes teaching his algebra class, he informs us “my clothes were wet – I may have looked as though I’d been sitting in a steam bath, all afternoon” (Baldwin 79-80). He is unable to cope with Sonny’s pain because he does not want pain in his own life. When he ultimately faces the loss of his little girl, who dies of polio, he finally writes to Sonny in prison. He attempts to connect with the only person that may comprehend this kind of suffering. When Sonny comes back home the narrator briefly feels the icy anxiety as he searches for any indication of drug abuse. The narrator is frightened of emotion, so when he starts to feel it he freezes up and hides the emotions inside. Sonny, however, is compelled to face his emotions head on, one way or another, whether through drugs or through music.

Baldwin implicates that Sonny became addicted to heroin due to the rage and distress contained within, him causing him to be unable to convey these emotions properly. It was easier to take drugs than to deal with his problems. Just as his older brother had difficulty confronting issues, Sonny reflects, “It's terrible sometimes, inside . . . that's what's the trouble. You walk these streets, …and there's no way of getting it out -- that storm inside. You can't talk it and you can't make love with it, and when you finally try to get with it and play it, you realize nobody's listening. So you've got to listen. You got to find a way to listen. . . . Sometimes you'll do anything to play, even cut your mother's throat" (Baldwin 95). The only time Sonny was able to extinguish these feelings was when he played the piano.

When the narrator goes to hear Sonny play at a jazz club, he finally grasped Sonny’s viewpoint of what he was going through. In order to recover and continue healing, Sonny had to place his whole soul, melodically, on the line. With the help from Creole, the bass player, “he wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny's witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing -- he had been there, and he knew" (Baldwin 98). The narrator was a witness as, "they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back . . . Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting" (Baldwin 99).

Just as the narrator was soaking wet at the beginning in school, Sonny is now soaking wet at the end of his performance. The difference was that the narrator was wet due to attempts to bottle his emotions inside and Sonny is wet from the now unconfined emotions he set free. The narrator may not have approved of Sonny’s lifestyle, he soon learns that one can take a different road in life and still come to the same result.

Sipiora, Phillip. “Sonny’s Blues.” Reading and Writing about Literature. Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. 79-99.

Awareness of Life

For hundreds of years, women have struggled with unrealistic ideals imposed unremittingly upon them. In “Yellow Woman”, Silko scrutinizes the domination of women and their roles as viewed within society. The young Pueblo woman feels compelled to flee the security of her monotonous life. Her role as a traditional passive woman begins to redefine with a fortuitous encounter.

Our modern society believes only in ideas for which we have substantial evidence to support. Now that the young Pueblo woman is educated, she does not have faith that the story of Yellow Woman, as her grandfather had told, could be true for her. She thinks to herself, “Eventually I will see someone, and then I will be certain that he is only a man - some man from nearby - and I will be sure that I am not Yellow Woman” (Silko 189). When Silva says to her, “Last night you guessed my name, and you knew why I had come”, she begins to doubt her previous thoughts as to whether she may be Yellow Woman (Silko 188). Awareness slowly begins to link the past and present; she contemplates what is happening now to the way things happened in the stories long-ago. With this newfound realization, she begins to conquer the more traditional submissive roles and expand into a more assertive individual.

Now that she perceives herself more as the Yellow Woman, she recognizes that she can decide her own fate instead of the traditional roles society has given women. She does not feel compelled to leave with Silva but desires to be with him. Silko seems to portray the young Pueblo woman as being fearful of him at times, when this fear is actually displaced feelings of abandonment of her more traditional roles. As seen when she thinks to herself, “I was afraid because I understood that his strength could hurt me. I lay underneath him and I knew he could destroy me. But later, while he slept beside me, I touched his face and I had a feeling – the kind of feeling for him that overcame me that morning along the river” (Silko 191). She is not ashamed of the new reality she has grasped with this enigmatic stranger. She remembered that she meant to go home, “but that didn’t seem important anymore” (Silko 191).

As she comes to terms that she is more like Yellow Woman and has a broader range of opportunities than she realized, she begins to think less of her family and more of her recent distinction of herself. She has several chances to return home but each time she missies the chance and chooses to stay. “There are enough of them to handle things. My mother and grandmother will raise the baby…..Al will find someone else, and they will go on like before” thought the young Pueblo woman (Silko 191). From these thoughts came a realization that she is more than the social traditions of a mother and wife. When she finally sees the white rancher, she has her proof that Silva is not the ka’tsina spirit.

The woman is sad when she finally does leave Silva after the confrontation with the rancher. After coming to the fork in the road, she chooses the route back to her home thinking, “I went that way instead of uphill to the mountains because I thought it was safer” (Silko 193). When she is at the river, thoughts flooded back to her of Silva and she longed to return to the mountains to find him again. She has faith that “he will come back sometime and be waiting again by the river” (Silko 193). This faith allows her to reunite with her family and normal life, but she still has control over the decisions she makes in her life.

Sipiora, Phillip. “Yellow Woman.” Reading and Writing about Literature. Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. 187-193.

Foolish Pride

Before Jack London wrote, “To Build a Fire”, he went on an expedition for gold in the Yukon Territory (Wissdorf). However, after spending a winter in a cabin located in the Klondike (and finding no gold), he struggled to survive, suffered from scurvy, and gained a wealth of material for his future writings (Wissdorf). During London’s education, he became disheartened with the academics; he felt that both the students and professors were missing genuineness (Wissdorf). These events helped influenced London’s writing. The unidentified man in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” has an unremitting risk of freezing in the harsh cold of the Yukon Territory. Before long, sheer attempts for survival overshadow his obsession with finding gold. The hostile surroundings will not provide any assistance; equally, his dog is not concerned about what happens to him, but only about his own survival. As he attempts to shield himself from nature, his concentration for survival intensifies and the battle between instinct and intellect begins.

From the beginning, the man is uneducated to the consequences of the harsh conditions of the Yukon. His aloof attitude will trigger regrettable consequences. He considered that, “The tremendous cold, and the strangeness of if all – made no impression on the man….Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all” (London 149). He disregarded the old-timers warning at Sulphur Creek regarding the merciless conditions, believing “Any man who was a man could travel alone” (London 154). He failed to see the implication when there had not been any travelers in a month along the trail. In addition, he disregarded his own frostbitten cheeks stating, “What were frosted cheeks? A bit painful, that was all; they were never serious” (London 151). This man was indeed deficient when it came to the instinctive insight of what the countless facts implied.

Throughout the story, the man demonstrates his intellect as he uses matches to build a fire, recognizes how cold it is through temperature readings, and pinpoints where he is located through use of a map. Yet the dogs’ instinctive nature knows the threats the cold presents and to remain warm by burrowing into the snow. Though the dog may not know its location on a map, it is able to track down through scents from a camp not far away. The dog was anxious about the cold, “The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to borrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air… and expected the man to go into camp or seek shelter somewhere to build a fire” (London 150). When the man stops for lunch and gets up from the fire, “The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire. This man did not know cold” (London 152). Through innate insight the dog knows the cold is treacherous, knows the spring is dicey, knows to gnaw at the ice that develops between its’ toes, and knows to stay far enough away from the fire to escape being singed. Contrary to this, the man’s intellect disappoints him.

The consequence of the tremendous cold causes the man’s fingers to go numb were he is unable to function with the matches accurately. He now cannot operate the matches nor his knife which make both tools ineffective and his intellect futile. He should have predicted that building a fire under a spruce tree would bring substantial consequences. The dog even senses when the man is deceitful and trying to kill it. Fittingly, only the dog survives and intuitively knows to go “in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food providers and fire providers” (London 158). We all should take accountability for our actions if we can predict probable conclusions.

Sipiora, Phillip. “To Build a Fire.” Reading and Writing about Literature. Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. 149-158.

Wissdorf, Reinhard. Jack London International. Weblication. 1999. 17 February 2007
http://jack-london.org/main_e.htm>