Sonny's BLues

Sonny’s Blues was a pretty good story and I liked it a lot.  Some of the themes are not as hidden as other stories we have read but still really meaningful I think.  The first is the constant theme of darkness and light throughout the whole story.  A lot of the story location itself is dark in the way it comes across with drugs and all other kinds of issues. Also it sounds as if Harlem, where the two brothers grew up was almost a prison.  Sonny, by doing whatever it took to break out took the harder road, though it had cost him.  The narrator in the story is almost still trapped in Harlem it feels, having never left and now raising children of his own there. I think another theme that shines through is that of the two brothers, the narrator who is older and watches out for Sonny.  It almost in a way comes across as Cain and Abel in the way that the mother asks the narrator to be his “brothers keeper.”  I think this could be religiously themed as well because it was said in the biography that the author depicted this kind of issues such as religion in his stories.  IN the end it turns out that Sonny is a very talented musician despite all of his hardships.  In a way, I think this almost represents how one can use your situation to better others.  The story is very sad in the way that it never talks about a happy time, always of death, or sorrow, or goodbyes.  Sonny has gone through even worse and yet he still is able to move people with his “blues” even though the drugs he is on are dwindling his mental health all the time.  It shows how we can turn our situation into something that can be used to strengthen or move someone else in a hard time and possibly bless them with freedom in the way that for Sonny music was the freedom.