Sibling Choice and Sibling "Success"

Sibling Choice and Sibling "Success" within James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" The philosophical question of who is actually more "successful" of the two brothers in James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues," Sonny or his older brother, is more complex than it at first appears. The easy and convenient answer is that Sonny's brother is more successful than Sonny is, since he holds a responsible job as an algebra teacher, is married with a family, and has never faced addictions or trouble with the law.

However, Sonny, with all his quirks, addictions, and faults, has managed, against considerable odds (and self-sabotage) to become a successful jazz pianist, a rarer, more difficult-to-achieve accomplishment, even if the lifestyle that that accomplishment has demanded (and still demands) of Sonny is fraught with ever-present temptations and dangers. While there are many separate motifs throughout "Sonny's Blues" (e.g., family, life-choices, racism, equality, suffering, and artistic expression), the idea of success and failure plays a key role.

In truth, Sonny and his brother have each experienced their respective successes and failures. In an unorthodox sense, Sonny is more successful, because, first, he understands what success means to him alone, and second, he is unwilling to give up that definition of success at any point in his life. Sonny has what most individuals yearn for all their lives but never achieve -- success on his own terms.

The overriding theme of "Sonny's Blues," in fact, is that of how the narrator comes to finally understand and respect Sonny's version of success, even if he himself neither understands nor shares it. Raised on the streets of Harlem, both brothers have had to surmount enormous odds to become successful, or at times even to survive.

In the beginning of the story, the narrator describes his own students who face the same temptations and obstacles he and Sonny faced at their age: "They were growing up with the rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities." Clearly, Sonny's brother is a success in many conventional ways. He is an algebra teacher in a high school in Harlem, has a wife and two children, and leads a stable middle-class life.

He understands (and believes) that the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary (as the saying goes). On the other hand, we also have a sense that he has had to give up some of who he is in order to become a conventional success. For example, Sonny's older brother's complete lack of either any familiarity with, or understanding of, jazz or the blues illustrates just how far he has removed himself from his own African-American roots, or any real of heartfelt connection to them.

Moreover, Sonny's older brother does have some of his own failures in life, despite his respectable veneer. One of these is that he is still living, and raising his own children, on the "killing streets" of Harlem. Another is that he remains in denial about all the suffering of people like himself, only less fortunate, going on around him daily. Emotionally, Sonny's brother is seriously blocked: uptight; very cautious in his life-choices, and extremely controlling.

He lives his life in a sort of self-perpetuating "darkness." It is not until the penultimate scene (in which he watches Sonny, inside the smoky piano bar, being himself and playing his jazz) that he realizes it is all right, perhaps, to step into the "light" and own his feelings. Ironically, it only when listening to Sonny playing his music that Sonny's older brother can even begin to grant himself that simple permission.

However, Baldwin continually tempts us, encourages us, in fact, to mistake Sonny for a failure, as his older brother does. After all, unlike his straight-arrow brother, Sonny is a confirmed drug addict. He struggles with family relationships, does poorly in school, and seems, to others at least, to have little direction in life.

However, I believe Sonny is actually more successful than his older brother: he steadfastly refuses to live by someone else's definition of "success." Instead, Sonny has always followed his dream of becoming a professional jazz pianist, regardless of others' criticisms or disparagement of that goal. Sonny's older brother may disapprove of Sonny's profession, but Sonny actually knows more about who he is, and from a young age, than his older brother does even at the end of the story.

Sonny does not let the opinions of others deter him from his goal or from being and remaining himself. Sonny's steadfast pursuit of that goal requires enormous inner strength and resolve, especially since his goal is to play music professionally, an endeavor in which the odds far outweigh most chance for success. Additionally,.