— Elizabeth Nguyen
Throughout the course, in the story “Sonny Blues” by James Baldwin was a short story that expressed the dominant themes and images from Baldwin’s life. The story demonstrates Baldwin’s ability to transform his social and political concerns into modern art. The story talks mainly about deterioration, religion, drug addiction, and World War 2 America all at the same time. Throughout the semester so far, “Sonny Blues” has been one of the greatest stories I’ve read because it connects to my family and the relationship between the narrator and Sunny reflects on the relationship between my brother and me. This story to me is valuable for me because in the future I can read it to my children and tell them that if they wanted to know about part of my past that they should read the story. The connection that I have with the story is in the beginning when the narrator doesn’t approve of the way his younger brother passion about music because he thought Sonny wasn’t talented until he heard the music that his brother played. In my daily life, my brother didn’t think I was talented person when I was little because he always thought I was a horrible singer and used to make fun of me until I joined the church choir at my church and then he realized that I did know how to sing, so that now he doesn’t make fun of me not knowing how to sing. In short, you don’t judge a person’s passion about something until you actually see it with your own eyes. In some parts of the story, it doesn’t relate to my daily life because in the story the narrator’s younger brother Sonny, goes to jail because of a drug addiction, but for me, neither me nor my brother has done drugs and got arrested. Some information in the story doesn’t relate to my daily life since it doesn’t really happen in my family. The story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid is similar to the story “Sonny’s Blues” because it has the same storyline, but it is a mother-daughter relationship instead of sibling relationship. In both “Girl” and “Sonny’s Blues” there is some sort of power in both stories, which makes the stories strong and precise to the point. Both stories reflect on the same story line that happened in different time periods and that are connected in some way. In today’s world, the story “Sonny’s Blues” has a little impact on the world today because in the world today we have COVID-19 which is drastically spreading in the United States mostly in New York. The story has little impacted us in 2020 due to the virus that is dramatically increasing in the world because every day there are thousands of new cases that has increased. In “Sonny’s Blues” at that time, it was all about music especially jazz during post World War 2. This story challenged me to think about what happened and reflect it into the world today and my personal experience. It was a little thinking actually having to know what happened and how it could relate to ourselves.
