James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues and the Art of Expression

In James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues," artistic expression creates a new language for the artist and his community in which to express the truth. The titular character is a jazz musician and heroin addict whose thirst to express the truth that lurks inside him is a powerful and even self-destructive urge. Yet this form of self-destruction is sacrificial, for it allows the narrator, who is Sonny's brother, to witness the truth that exists all around him, not only through Sonny's music but in life itself.

"Sonny's Blues" is less about Sonny as it is about the entire Black community. Told from the narrator who struggles to understand his brother, Sonny's addiction is treated neither as a tragedy nor as a triumph, but a means to an end. Through drugs and music, Sonny is capable of delving deep into his soul to discover a new form of personal and spiritual interpretation. Like many jazz musicians on which Sonny is based, Sonny's desire to "[g]et[ting] it out-that storm inside," to play it even when he "realizes nobody's listening" (Martin 507) is so overwhelming that he can barely control it. He struggles to find the perfect musical language in which to express this "storm inside." Music becomes a substitute language of interpersonal expression for a people stripped of their own langauge. Through much of the twentieth century, African Americans have used the linguistic codes of music as a means to express themselves and to form a communcation with others that is appropriate to their experiences and values. Jazz, along with the blues and later rhythm and blues and hip hop, has become the appropriate vehicle in which black people have been able to interpret those spiritual truths that an alien language thrust upon them has not enabled them to achieve. Sonny's determination to find that right language through music leads him to self-destruction, yet this desire to find the right language and Sonny's willingness to destroy himself in order to do that, forms the crux of his sacrifice to his community.