The Instrument of Addiction

After reading and discussing James Baldwin's “Sonny’s Blues,” I found myself exploring the details of the story, particularly its powerful performance scene as an ending. What was so moving for me was the fact that it was both something I didn’t expect, and pertaining to so much more than just a simple jazz performance. Right from the beginning of the story, we are thrown into the narrator’s discovery of his brother Sonny’s arrest and the fact that he discovered such news through a newspaper. With such an intense beginning, I felt that there was much to be anticipated and a lot of room for a continuation of these impactful events. Instead of ending with something matching the action and intensity of the imprisonment of Sonny, Baldwin chooses to take a more reflective path, detailing Sonny’s life in the form of his musical performance at the nightclub.

Upon my first reading of the ending scene, I was able to grasp some of the surface level themes such as the conflict between the narrator and his brother, the struggle of performing while sober, and the idea of the narrator finally crossing into “Sonny’s world” by watching his piano playing in the nightclub. After discussing it in class and reading it a second time, I began to envision the ending scene not only as a musical performance, but as a metaphor for Sonny’s life and drug addiction. Initially, the narrator exhibits an array of emotions including anxiety and fear about his brother’s performance. These same moods were portrayed in the earlier story when the narrator is worried about his brother’s financial situation, future, and general wellbeing (with specific respect to his drug use). Both times, the narrator feels responsible and protective for his brother’s outcome and fears for the worst. The scene further escalates when Sonny’s discomfort is apparent “His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it.” His brothers situation seems to be heading downhill and mirrors Sonny’s gradual drug addiction and eventual arrest.

The narrator then mentions his own observation about the relationship between the musician and his instrument. When I first read this I took this as a purely musical relationship (which was profound in itself) but then I considered that maybe Baldwin was hinting at something much deeper: Sonny’s dependence on heroin. The narrator describes the relationship between the player and the instrument as an awful one, one that requires the breath of one’s own life in order to reach fulfillment. In a sense, the same goes for a drug and its user. In order for the drug to take full force, the user must surrender themselves to its effects and risk their own well being to satisfy the hunger inside them. The narrator ends the comparison with “While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.” By allowing the heroin to take over his life, Sonny is letting it “do everything” and fulfilling his own part of the twisted relationship. Of course, this is just my own interpretation of Baldwin's portrayal of the scene, and could be in fact completely contradictory to Baldwin's own intentions, but the connection between the performance and Sonny’s life and drug use is certainly apparent.