Two Poems Compare and Contrast

Introduction

This paper is based on the comparison between two literatures Sonny's Blues and Fences. The comparison is based on the thesis statement, which is stated below, and the story theme.

Thesis Statement

Sonny's Blues and Fences are based on the real life African American situation in order to discuss the economy as a whole.

Comparison

"Sonny's Blues" is a first-person account by an African-American schoolteacher trying to come to terms with his younger brother, Sonny, a jazz musician and sometime heroin addict. Some of James Baldwin's thematic preoccupations can be ascertained by noting the subtle variations and quasi-musical interplay of motifs: darkness (both atmospheric and existential), (in) audible attempts to articulate or testify, and the spatial coordinates of inside/outside (a complex motif entailing withdrawal into privacy, the filling of voids, and the impulse to escape or transcend compression) (Baldwin, 65-135).

The story begins as a retrospect from darkness. Shocked to read a newspaper account of his brother's arrest for drug use, the unnamed narrator stares vacantly at his face reflected in the train window, "trapped in the darkness which roared outside". Darkness recurs periodically throughout the narrator's reminiscence and is often associated with the menace of the outer world. The narrator remembers Sundays at twilight, when as a child he felt "the darkness coming" while registering with anxiety the adults talking darkly of a dark past. His obscure intimations of the possibility of their death are not dispelled when someone turns on a light. He must endure as his ancestors always have. One of the incursions of darkness endured by his people has been the murderous running over by whites of his father's brother, a musician. The narrator's mother testifies that his father had "never in his life seen anything as dark as that road after the lights of that car had gone away".

The narrator begins to realize after many years of conflict with his brother that the blues and jazz represent the antithesis of this escape through distraction into alienated solitude. They constitute a negotiation and transformation of darkness and suffering. Creole, the leader of Sonny's group, testifies with his bass how innovative jazz approaches to the blues (in this case, be bop) are retelling the tales of "how we suffer … and how we may triumph" because they are "the only light we've got in all this darkness". However, the intense revelations of light are also risky and potentially destructive. Sitting "in a dark corner" watching his brother and his colleagues preparing to play in their "circle of light," the narrator notes that they are "most careful not to step into [it] too suddenly," as if "they would perish in flame" (Baldwin, 589-620).

The narrator sees Sonny in his students because they are approximately the age that his brother was when he started heroin use and are "filled with rage," much as Sonny must have been, because of "the low ceiling of their actual possibilities". The narrator's perception, suffused with guilt and pathos, is acutely attuned to ...