Guzu Ioana-Cristina,EF, 3rd year Sonnys Blues James BaldwinJames Baldwin's Sonny's Blues is the story of a young jazz musician (Sonny) from Harlem, NY who gets addicted to heroin, is arrested for using and selling drugs, and returns to his childhood neighborhood after his release from prison. He moves in with his older brother (the story's narrator) and his brother's family. The two brothers sort of reconnect after a very tense few weeks during which both try to deal with their anger towards each other. Drugs are a central part of the story, but it's also about family, music, and trying to overcome life's struggles.Harlem was Baldwin's hometown, and he was born there in 1924. In his teens, he worked as a Pentecostal preacher, under the influence of his father. Yet as he grew older, he moved away from the influence of the church. He found himself an apartment in the artist's district of Greenwich Village, NY and then, in 1948, in part due to the alienation he felt as a gay black man in the US, he moved to Paris.

Central themes Drugs and alcoholYou mean they'll let him out. And then he'll just start working his way back in again. You mean he'll never kick the habit. Is that what you mean? Sonnys brotherWhen she was singing before," said Sonny, abruptly, "her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes when it's in your veins. It makes you feel sort of warm and cool at the same time.-SonnySome guys, you can tell from the way they play, they on something all the time. And you can see that, well, it makes something real for them. Suffering and the feeling of being trappedYou don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb out of some deep, real deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.-Sonnys letter to his brother while he was in prisonHe had made it his: that long line of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. . . . I saw my mother's face again . . . I saw the moonlit road where my father's brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel's tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.