Brotherhood in Sonny's Blues Brotherhood Essay

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It is in the imagery of music that we come to understand Sonny's character. He is a tortured soul. He represents sadness and feeling, by contrast with his brother who represents fear and reason. Sonny does not avoid the darkness. He dives into it. The darkness and ice nourish him for some reason. He finds it in the blues he plays and in his obsession with music. At the same time, he sinks into his own depths, never able to talk. The image of depth characterizes him. Sonny withdraws into himself. He becomes insular in response to the outside world. His brother remembers him as a child full of "privacy" (1). This suggests a personality trend that contributes to the way he deals with suffering and conflict. After fights with his father, his brother remembers that "Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached" (8). In other words, from hurt at misunderstanding, he won't listen or be reasoned with. it's why he is misunderstood. He feels like a man "who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep, and funky hole, and just saw the sun up there, outside" (5). Here depth is connected with the absence of light. Sonny is neither strong nor rational like his older brother. He is "loose and dreamlike," reflecting the jazz he loves and the drugs (16). His brother views his music as an excuse for a ruinous lifestyle (16). They fight at his Greenwich Village apartment, as they go down separate paths. Sonny's brother has no room inside him for the negative. He keeps everything outside, externalized, so that he doesn't have to feel it. The siblings are opposites.

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"I hadn't wanted to know," he thinks, ". . . I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out" (2). He rejects his brother's "downfall" because it is a fear too difficult to bear. The siblings live in different worlds created by different personalities responding to the same circumstances.

This comes out in conflict over music, the pervasive symbol. Sonny's brother tries to convince him to abandon his desire and go to school (11-13). He doesn't believe in his brother's path. He is worried whether he can make a living at music. We see here the contrast between the serious, responsible older sibling and the laughing younger sibling, whose passion drives him impractically into music. He says, "I simply couldn't see why on earth he'd want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor" (12). This suggests that he doesn't get it -- he derides music as a form of life. He doesn't know who "Bird" is (13). He doesn't realize that music means everything to Sonny. It is "life or death for him" (16). Frustrated, Sonny says, "What I don't seem to be able to make you understand is that it's the only thing that I want to do" (13). Sonny believes in following his passion and that's his reason for living. His practical brother thinks that you cannot always do what you want. Neither did his brother's wife understand Sonny's music. It was living with sound, not a person, and "the sound didn't make any sense to her, didn't make.....

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