What Event Prompts the Narrator to, Write His Brother?

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Sonny's Blues Sonny's Blues

Sonny's Blues

• We're introduced to the unnamed narrator in the opening lines of the story as he explains how he read a story in the paper well-nigh someone he knew. We don't know who this is however, or what the story is nigh, only it affects the narrator so deeply that he sees the story "in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and trunk of the people" (1).
• At get-go the narrator doesn't want to believe what he's read, and he tries to convince himself that the story isn't true. But deep downward he knows that information technology is, and this scares him. This is when we hear Sonny's proper noun the outset fourth dimension, when the narrator says that, he was scared, scared for Sonny" (2).
• The narrator reads the story on his way to a loftier school, and we find out that he'south an algebra teacher. All twenty-four hours long equally he teaches his classes, the story about Sonny sticks with him and creates a "smashing block of water ice" (ii) in his stomach that won't go away. At times the narrator feels like the ice is melting, merely when he remembers "some specific affair Sonny had once done or said" (2), the icy feeling comes back. So, even though nosotros don't know who Sonny is yet, or what's happened to him, nosotros can at least tell that he and the narrator take some history.
• The narrator thinks dorsum to when Sonny was the age of the students in his algebra classes, and he remembers his "bright and open up" face (3), his "wonderfully direct brownish eyes" (3), and his "not bad gentleness and privacy" (3). As he wonders what Sonny'due south face is like now, we learn what the newspaper story is almost: Sonny, the narrator's younger brother, has been arrested for selling and using heroin.
• Apparently the narrator had suspected that Sonny was dabbling in drugs, only he tried to ignore his suspicions. He told himself that "Sonny was wild, simply he wasn't crazy. And he'd e'er been a skillful boy" (4), even though he was raised in a tough Harlem neighborhood.
• The narrator e'er thought Sonny had then much potential and promise, and he didn't want to think about the possibility of all of that going to waste material. As he stands in front of his class, he realizes that any one of these high school boys might exist shooting up heroin in the bathroom during break. He's pretty certain Sonny was virtually their age the first fourth dimension he used heroin.
• The day is pretty rough for the narrator and it drags on forever. When classes finally let out, he decides he should probably become dwelling house and talk to his wife, Isabel, nigh Sonny. By the time he leaves, the school is most empty. Merely he sees a young man who looks so much similar Sonny that he starts to call out to his brother until he realizes that it's an old friend of Sonny'due south (someone the narrator never really liked). Evidently this guy is ever loftier and always asking for money, and even though he'due south an developed now, he still hangs around the schoolhouse.
• In an instant, the narrator goes from not liking this guy to really hating him (maybe because he makes him think of Sonny). The guy (whose name we never learn) sort of skulks over to the narrator and asks him if he's heard the news almost Sonny.
• The two chat for a petty fleck, but the narrator wants to go home (and abroad from this guy), so he tries to make some excuse nigh needing to become to the subway. The guy doesn't become the hint and tags along with the narrator.
• He asks the narrator what he plans to do near Sonny, and the narrator tells him he can't actually practice anything. We learn that he hasn't seen his blood brother in over a yr and he hasn't decided that he wants to do annihilation for Sonny. (This sounds pretty harsh, simply mayhap the narrator is still trying to process the news almost his blood brother.)
• Sonny'southward friend tells the narrator that he's kind of surprised by Sonny'south arrest. He always thought Sonny "was besides smart to go hung" (21) on drugs (just similar the narrator). And then he tells the narrator that he thinks he might accept had something to exercise with Sonny's drug habit.
• This revelation interests the narrator, so he finally stops to really mind to the guy. It seems Sonny's friend never gave him whatever drugs, only when he was high at school 1 mean solar day, Sonny asked him how it felt to shoot heroin. He told him that "it felt bully" (27), so he thinks he may have unintentionally encouraged Sonny to try drugs.
• The narrator quickly decides that he doesn't want to hear this – he doesn't desire to know what might accept started Sonny's addiction and he doesn't want to know what it's like to do hard drugs. But he does want to know what might happen to Sonny at this signal, so he asks Sonny's friend. The answer doesn't make him feel much better.
• The guy tells the narrator that Sonny will virtually likely exist released and will go sent to rehab. Then they'll tell him he'southward cured and send him on his way, and he'll merely start using drugs again. He tells the narrator that this will exist "crude on one-time Sonny" (41) (information technology'due south virtually like he wants to make certain the narrator realizes this). As the two get ready to get their separate ways, he asks the narrator for some money. (Really, he pretends he's forgotten his money at home, but this is a trick he e'er pulls.)
• The narrator gives him five bucks and goes down to the subway to catch his ride domicile.
• The story jumps alee at this signal and the narrator tells united states that he didn't contact Sonny or ship him annihilation in jail for quite awhile. Just then the narrator's lilliputian girl dies, so he writes Sonny to let him know. (Nosotros'll get more than details on the daughter'southward death subsequently in the story.)
• Sonny writes dorsum, and the narrator says that the letter of the alphabet "made him feel like a bastard" (47). Sonny'due south letter is pretty middle-wrenching. He tells the narrator that he doesn't know how he ended up in the position he's in. He says he'south glad their parents are expressionless so they don't have to live with the shame and pain of having a son who'due south addicted to drugs. He apologizes to the narrator for any hurting he's caused him and he says he'd "rather accident his brains out" (51) than accept to alive through this feel again.
• We likewise larn from this letter that Sonny is a musician (this volition become pretty important later on), and he doesn't want his blood brother to think that beingness a musician is what has led to his condign a drug addict. He asks the narrator if he'll run into him when he gets back to New York (after jail and rehab) and tells him how sorry he is almost the narrator's little girl, Gracie.
• After receiving this letter, the narrator starts keeping in bear on with Sonny. He picks him up when he gets back to the city. When they get-go see each other, the narrator suddenly remembers a lot of things nigh his brother that he had forgotten up to this bespeak, and he starts "to wonder well-nigh Sonny, about the life Sonny lived" (52).
• The two men haven't seen each other for a long, long time, and they have a lot they want to say. Just it'southward besides really awkward considering they don't really know how to pick up where they left off.
• They catch a cab and the narrator asks Sonny if he still wants to go to Bharat one day. It seems that in his younger days, Sonny read a lot about Indian culture and meditation, and he used to want to visit Bharat. Sonny laughs at the memory and says that Harlem "is Indian plenty for him" (66).
• As they brand their way to their narrator'due south apartment, Sonny asks if they can drive by the park (we recollect he means Central Park) since it's been such a long time since he's seen New York. As they practise this, the narrator notes the gradual change between the well-kept and elegant environment of the park and the "vivid, killing streets of their babyhood" (72) in Harlem.
• The narrator starts thinking most the young men who live on these streets and about how most of them won't ever escape. The narrator lives in a housing project like the one he and Sonny grew upwardly in, and for a moment he starts to worry that he's bringing Sonny dorsum to a place he doesn't want to exist.
• Their first dinner together is a little awkward. Sonny'south oldest nephew remembers his uncle, and his youngest nephew seems to really like him. The narrator's wife Isabel seems to have an easy rapport with Sonny. She makes him laugh, doesn't avert any subject of chat, and "gets Sonny past his first, faint stiffness" (77).
• The narrator doesn't feel at ease the manner Isabel does. He catches himself "watching Sonny for signs" (77) of drug use. He doesn't do this to be judgmental; he explains that he's "trying to find out something about his brother" (77) and that all he really wants is for Sonny to "tell him he was safe" (77).
• This idea of safety reminds the narrator of his and Sonny'south begetter, who e'er said there was no such thing as a safe place. We learn that he died when Sonny was just xv.
• The narrator recalls a few more details almost his father and the relationship he had with Sonny. Sonny "was the apple of his father's eye. It was considering he loved Sonny so much and was frightened for him, that he was ever fighting with Sonny" (79). Even though their father was "big and rough and loud-talking" (79) while Sonny was quiet and introverted, the narrator tells us that they were very much alike because "they both had that aforementioned privacy" (79).
• The narrator as well starts to recall their mother, who tried to explicate this sense of privacy to the narrator just afterward their begetter passed away. He has these mixed-upward memories about Sunday afternoons when all of the adults from church building and their family unit would sit in the living room and talk well-nigh their hard lives. They would momentarily forget about the kids who were falling asleep on the couch or in their parents' laps and would talk until it got dark outside. Then 1 of them would realize how late it was and would turn the light on. They would terminate talking in front of the kids because they didn't desire them to "know too much too soon" (82).
• The narrator remembers the very terminal time he saw his mother live: she told him to make certain to look out for Sonny subsequently she's gone.
• The narrator initially brushed this idea aside since he didn't think anything would happen to her or Sonny. Only and so she told him about their father'southward brother (an uncle they never knew they had), who died when he was immature and whose death haunted their begetter for the balance of his life.
• The story almost the brother'southward death is really, actually horrible. He and their father are out drinking one night, and the uncle (who was a musician like Sonny) has his guitar slung effectually his shoulder. As they stumble domicile, the brother has to go to the bathroom, so he finds a tree down the hill from where they're walking and starts to relieve himself. All all of a sudden, their male parent hears a car coming. He races down the loma just in time to encounter the "motorcar . . . full of white men" (96) aim for his brother.
• The narrator's female parent thinks they just meant to scare the uncle, simply they were boozer and he was drunkard and didn't spring out of the style in time. He screamed as they ran over him, and the narrator's father heard the guitar go smashed to bits and the men in the automobile yelling as they kept driving. When he finally got to his brother, he "weren't cypher merely blood and pulp" (96).
• The narrator's mother tells him that their father was never the same later on this, and that part of him suspected every white man of being the i who ran his blood brother over. She never allow her husband tell the narrator and Sonny almost this, but she said their big, tough dad oftentimes cried on her shoulder when he thought virtually his brother.
• She explains that she'southward non telling the narrator about all of this to make him sad or scared, or to cause him to hate or suspect white men the manner his father did. She'south "telling him this because he got a brother. And the earth own't changed" (100).
• After hearing this, the narrator promises that he won't ever let anything happen to Sonny. His mother explains that he can't end bad things from happening to his brother; she merely wants to make sure that he'll be there for Sonny if something does happen.
• Two days after this conversation, the narrator marries Isabel. He sort of forgets this talk until he comes home from the military to attend his mother's funeral. After the funeral, he and Sonny are lonely and the narrator "tries to notice out something almost him" (108). He asks Sonny what he plans to do with his life, and this is the first time the narrator hears that Sonny wants to be a musician.
• Sonny tells the narrator that he wants to play piano, and the narrator slips into big-brother way. He worries that Sonny won't be able to make a living equally a musician. Sonny is upset that the narrator tin't understand his passion for music.
• The narrator senses Sonny'due south anger, so he tries to relate to his younger blood brother on some level. He asks him what kind of musician he wants to be, assuming it'due south something "respectable" like a concert pianist. This makes Sonny laugh, which sort of frustrates the narrator considering he feels like he'due south being laughed at.
• At present it'due south Sonny'southward turn to endeavour to brand amends, and so he explains to the narrator that he wants to be a jazz musician. This really freaks the narrator out, in office because he "had always put jazz musicians in a class . . . called 'adept-time' people" (122).
• The narrator'due south offset reaction is to ask Sonny, "'Are y'all serious'" (123), to which Sonny replies, "'Hell, yes, I'g serious'" (124). Sonny of a sudden looks "more helpless than e'er, and annoyed, and deeply injure" (125), and the narrator realizes that he's put his human foot in his oral fissure. He tries to shift the tone of the conversation, and so he asks Sonny if he wants to play music like Louis Armstrong (this seems similar the only jazz musician he can retrieve of). Sonny says Armstrong's music is "crap" (127), and that he wants to play like Charlie Parker instead.
• The narrator is lost (he'southward never heard of Charlie Parker), and although he thinks this is just a phase Sonny is going through, it still worries him a piddling. He pushes Sonny a trivial more and asks him if he knows how much fourth dimension it volition take for him to learn this music.
• Sonny tells him he's willing to spend as much time every bit it takes, and the narrator starts to see something different in his lilliputian brother. He'south never seen him this upset, just when Sonny tries to explain that all he actually wants to do in life is be a jazz musician, the narrator can't aid but say that sometimes people don't become to do what they desire.
• Sonny speedily cuts him off and says that people should be able to exercise whatever makes them happy. They keep going around in circles, and so the narrator tries to change the subject. He reminds Sonny that he has to graduate from loftier school, and since both of their parents are dead and the narrator is away in the military machine, it's been decided that Sonny should move in with Isabel and her parents.
• This isn't platonic for anyone, particularly Sonny. He doesn't desire to move in with Isabel, he doesn't want to stay in school, and more than than annihilation, he doesn't desire to stay in Harlem. He drops a big surprise on the narrator when he declares that he wants to bring together the regular army.
• The narrator is shocked, aroused, and scared for his brother: "You must exist crazy. You goddamn fool, what the hell do you want to go and join the army for?" (154). Sonny tells him over again that it'south the simply way he sees of getting out of Harlem. Desperate, the narrator tries to reason with Sonny in terms that might appeal to him, so he asks him how he plans to study music if he's in the war machine.
• Sonny replies that he'll exist able to study on the Thou.I. Pecker when he gets back, simply the narrator reminds him that he might non come back at all. He pleads with Sonny to stay domicile and at least stop loftier school. He even promises to help him go a musician when he gets back domicile, as long as Sonny stays in school and lives with Isabel and her family unit.
• Sonny is angry; he feels his blood brother isn't listening to him or considering what he wants for his ain life. But he finally agrees to move in with Isabel, and he'due south slightly pleased when the narrator reminds him that they have a piano he tin can practice on whenever he likes.
• The adjacent fourth dimension nosotros see Sonny is when he's living in Isabel's house, and male child does he take full advantage of that pianoforte. He practices day and night, playing the same notes over and over. When he buys a record histrion, he listens to a vocal and so goes to the piano and practices the song bit by scrap until he has it down pat.
• Somewhen, this constant playing starts to get to Isabel and her parents, and she tells the narrator that living with Sonny "wasn't like living with a person at all, it was like living with a sound" (168). It'southward non that Sonny is rude or unpleasant, but he just sort of retreats into himself when he's playing the piano, and "there wasn't any way to reach him" (168).
• Isabel and her family discover themselves in an bad-mannered position. Sonny isn't really a kid, but he's not actually an adult notwithstanding either. They know he has nowhere else to become, and then they don't want to kick him out. And they don't even desire to tell him to stop playing the piano "considering even they sensed . . . that Sonny was at that piano playing for his life" (169).
• But things somewhen boil over when they learn that Sonny hasn't been going to school. After a lot of pressing, Sonny finally admits that he'south been hanging out in Greenwich Hamlet, "with musicians, and other characters, in a white girl's flat" (170).
• This scares Isabel's female parent and she finally lets loose on Sonny. She screams at him and accuses him of being ungrateful for all of the sacrifices they've been making for him.
• Sonny is deeply affected by this (so much so that he doesn't play the piano at all for the residuum of the day). When Isabel gets domicile she starts crying, and this gets to Sonny more than anything. Isabel tells the narrator that "she just watched Sonny'southward face" (171) and that "She could tell, by watching him . . . that they penetrated his cloud, they had reached him" (171). Sonny starts to realize that he'south get a burden, something he never wanted to exist.
• For the next few days, Sonny doesn't play the pianoforte. So ane day Isabel is in his room and sees that his records are gone. She realizes that Sonny has left. Nobody knows what's happened to him until he sends the narrator a postcard from Greece telling him that he's joined the navy.
• The narrator and Sonny don't see each other for a long time after this, and when they finally do they just stop up fighting. The narrator doesn't similar what Sonny has become, "the style he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time" (173). He doesn't like the people he hangs out with, and "his music seemed to be only an alibi for the life he led" (173).
• After one particularly horrible statement, the two don't see each other for months. Eventually the narrator decides to expect for Sonny and finds him at an flat in Greenwich Village. There are a ton of people in Sonny'due south room and Sonny won't get upwardly from his bed to talk to the narrator lonely. They get-go arguing once more and the narrator tells Sonny that "he might just as well be dead as live the way he's living" (174). Sonny tells the narrator that'due south fine with him, that he was dead as far as his brother was concerned (173). He shoves the narrator out of his apartment. Equally the narrator is going down the stairs he hears someone laughing at him. He starts to cry.
• The story jumps alee to when the narrator first learns of Sonny's bug with the constabulary. That aforementioned autumn is when the narrator's daughter dies (her proper name is Grace). He tells us the details of her death and they are heart-breaking.
• Grace was only 2 when she died from polio, and the narrator tells us that "she suffered" (175). It all started with what seemed like an innocent fever, and Grace seemed to feel improve after a few days, and then the narrator and Isabel thought she was OK. Only one day, when Isabel was in the kitchen, she heard Grace fall down and go silent. The narrator tells us that, "When Isabel . . . heard that thump and and then that silence, something happened in her to brand her agape" (175).
• When Isabel found Grace on the living room floor, she was "all twisted up" and "she couldn't get her jiff" (175). When she finally screamed, "it was the worst sound, Isabel says, that she'd always heard in her life" (175). The narrator tells us that Isabel "however hears it sometimes in her dreams" and that she "will sometimes wake upwardly with a low, moaning, strangled sound" (175)
• It's Grace's death that prompts the narrator to finally contact Sonny (he writes him on the twenty-four hours of Grace's funeral). He says "his problem made Sonny's real" (175).
• The story jumps alee over again to roughly two weeks after Sonny has moved in with the narrator and his family. It's Saturday and the narrator is home alone. He wants to search Sonny's room but also kind of doesn't, since he's a fiddling scared of what he'll find. As he'due south going dorsum and forth in his listen nigh what to do, he starts to stare out the window at the street below.
• An interesting scene unfolds on the street. Some people are holding a religious revival and people are stopping to watch. The narrator tells us that, "The revival was existence carried on by three sisters in black, and a brother" (178). They're singing, holding their Bibles, and playing the tambourine.
• The i man is "testifying" (178) (sort of preaching and talking about his own religious experiences), and the women are singing and collecting donations from the crowd.
• Even though the narrator grew up watching these sidewalk revivals, he sees something new in this i. He realizes that the woman in the revival isn't that dissimilar from "the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped lips, her pilus a cuckoo'southward nest, her confront scarred and bloated from many beatings, and her black eyes glittering like coal" (179). The women seem to recognize that they're non that dissimilar from each other, and the narrator thinks this is why they call each other "Sister" (1179).
• The narrator watches the crowd as they listen to the music from the revival and he thinks that "the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them" (179) and to sort of comport them away from their bleak lives for just a moment. Equally he looks at a few specific people in the crowd, he suddenly sees Sonny standing there, carrying a notebook that "made him look . . . almost like a schoolboy" (179)
• Sonny smiles at the revival members, throws a few coins in the drove plate, then walks upwards to the flat where he joins the narrator at the window. He mentions that the woman has "a warm voice" (183), and as he and the narrator sit down downwards on the sofa he invites the narrator to a society to hear him play that night.
• The narrator "sensed . . . that he couldn't say no" (189), and then he agrees to go. The two men watch the revival wind downwards and then Sonny starts to open up up to his brother a bit.
• He starts to talk near using heroin and tells that narrator that the woman singing at the revival "reminded him for a infinitesimal of what heroin feels similar sometimes – when information technology's in your veins. It makes you lot feel sort of warm and cool at the aforementioned time. And afar. And – and certain" (195). Sonny avoids looking at the narrator while he'southward saying all this, but he keeps talking.
• He tells the narrator that heroin also makes him experience "in control" (195). The narrator asks angrily if he needs heroin to be able to play music. Sonny tries to explain to his brother that he needs heroin, "not so much to play. It'southward to stand information technology, to be able to brand information technology at all. On whatever level. . . . In club to keep from shaking to pieces" (201).
• The narrator starts to ask more questions. He gets on Sonny's case virtually his addict friends, but he stops himself later on realizing that "Sonny was doing his best to talk" (203). Sonny keeps trying to explain things to his brother, like why certain people get hooked on drugs, and why some musicians he plays with have to get loftier in lodge to part. He tells the narrator that some of them want to exercise drugs.
• The narrator asks Sonny if he wants to do drugs, just Sonny doesn't really answer this question. Instead, he tells the narrator that when he was listening to the woman sing at the revival he couldn't finish thinking virtually "how much suffering she must have had to go through – to sing similar that" (205). The narrator responds that there actually isn't any style around suffering, and Sonny agrees, but he as well replies that, "that's never stopped anyone from trying" (207).
• At this moment the narrator realizes that things volition never be the same betwixt him and Sonny. It's not so much the drugs, or the fact that Sonny has been arrested. Information technology's that the narrator wasn't in that location for Sonny when he needed him well-nigh, that he "had held silence – so long! – when Sonny had needed homo speech to aid him" (207).
• The 2 brothers keep talking about suffering, and almost the possibility of escaping information technology. The narrator feels that people should "merely . . . accept information technology" (208) since at that place'southward no fashion to get away from it, merely this angers Sonny, who declares, "Just nobody just takes it. . . . Everybody tries not to" (209). He accuses the narrator of having a problem with people who endeavour to bargain with suffering in ways that are different from his, but the narrator angrily declares that he doesn't care about other people. All he cares about is Sonny and the fact that he doesn't "want to see him – die – trying not to suffer" (210).
• Sonny tells the narrator that he won't dice "whatever faster than everyone else" (211), and while this isn't exactly what the narrator wants to hear, he tin see that Sonny at least isn't trying to die. All the same, at that place is more the narrator wants to say, "nearly volition power and how life could be – well, beautiful" (213). And he wants to let Sonny know that he'll never abandon him once again. But he's afraid it won't sound genuine, so instead he "makes the promise to himself and prays that he will keep it" (214).
• Sonny keeps trying to explicate to the narrator what was going on inside him that led him to drugs. He tells him about the loneliness of walking the streets, his inability to escape his surroundings, the "tempest inside" (215). And when there's null left to do, that's when he plays his music. He tells the narrator that there are times when a person will practise "anything to play, even cut your mother's throat. . . . or your brother's. . . . Or your ain'" (216).
• He realizes how this terminal argument must sound, then he tells the narrator that he doesn't need to worry about him because he thinks he'south finally OK (or at least he will be). But he also says that he'll never exist able to forget "where he's been. And what he'due south been" (217).
• When the narrator asks Sonny indicate blank what exactly he has been, Sonny struggles to explain. He talks about not feeling part of the world effectually him, about hurting other people and himself, about the storm coming out of him when he played music. He talks about when he hitting rock bottom and how he was disgusted past his own smell. And he tells the narrator that he doesn't know when their mother passed away, only that he had to get abroad from Harlem in gild to get abroad from drugs.
• Sonny keeps talking, and he tells the narrator that when he got dorsum to Harlem, nil had really changed. He was a fiddling older, but he was still the aforementioned person when it came down to information technology. And he reminds both himself and the narrator that "'It can come over again'" (218). (By "it," we think he means drugs, but also all the things that led him to drugs in the kickoff place.)
• The narrator finally seems to empathise, at least a little. Sonny tells him, "'I had to endeavor to tell you'" (220), and the narrator finally seems to go it.
• As this conversation comes to a shut, Sonny looks at the narrator with no smiling and says, "Y'all're my brother" (222), as if to remind the narrator that they're family, and the narrator replies, "Yes, . . . yes I understand that" (224).
• Later that nighttime Sonny and the narrator head to a nightclub, and equally shortly every bit they enter people come to greet Sonny. It's dark in the club and the narrator hears a deep voice say, "'Hullo, male child'" (225) to Sonny earlier he sees who the voice belongs to. Just and then "an enormous blackness human, much older than Sonny or the narrator, erupted out of all that atmospheric lighting and put an arm around Sonny'southward shoulder" (225). He tells Sonny that he's "been sitting correct hither . . . waiting for him" (225), and soon other people in the club first to detect that Sonny has returned.
• Sonny introduces this man (whose name is Creole) to his brother, and Creole tells the narrator that he's glad to encounter him in a way that makes the narrator realize "that he was glad to meet him in that location, for Sonny'southward sake" (228).
• Soon another musician comes up and starts sharing stories about Sonny, and earlier long the narrator realizes that anybody at that place knows his brother and that he is "in Sonny's world" at present (229).
• It's almost time for Sonny and the other musicians to play, so Creole seats the narrator at a tabular array by himself. The musicians, including Sonny, hang out below the bandstand, just exterior the spotlight, and the narrator gets the feeling that they're all "being most conscientious not to footstep into that circle of light too suddenly: that if they moved into the lite also suddenly, without thinking, they would perish in flame" (230).
• Slowly the musicians make their way to their instruments, and "Creole took Sonny by the arm and led him to the piano" (230). A adult female announces Sonny's proper name to the crowd, and they clap. Sonny, "beingness funny and being ceremonious, and so touched . . . that he could accept cried, but neither hiding it nor showing it, riding it similar a man, grinned, and put both hands to his middle and bowed at the waist" (230).
• Creole goes to his instrument (the bass fiddle), another man grabs a horn, there's someone on drums, and Sonny is at the pianoforte. The narrator senses a change in the atmosphere. It gets tranquility and the lights turn blue, and the "room began . . . to tighten" (231). The musicians all await different, too. The narrator sees Creole expect at all of the musicians, "equally though he were making sure that all his chickens were in the coop, and and so he – jumped and struck the dabble. And there they were" (231).
• As the narrator listens to the music, he begins to think nearly the difference between a musician and his audition. The audience hears "personal, private, vanishing evocations" (232), but he thinks the musician must hear something different. He thinks that the "man who creates the music . . . is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air" (232). (This sounds a lot like what Sonny was trying to explain earlier, doesn't information technology?)
• The narrator watches Sonny closely and sees in his face up that "he was working hard, just he wasn't with it' (232). And he likewise senses that the residual of the musicians are sort of waiting for Sonny to detect his stride but likewise "pushing him along" (232) at the same fourth dimension.
• He switches his attention to Creole and realizes that he's the one in charge. Creole is the ane "who held them all dorsum. He had them on a short rein" (232). Creole is listening to all of the musicians, simply he'southward actually listening to Sonny. The narrator describes it as Creole "having a dialogue with Sonny' (232) through the music, and he senses that Creole wants Sonny to "get out the shoreline and strike out for deep water" (1232). In other words, Creole wants Sonny to stop playing it and then safe and to really permit himself go. He wants him to come across that "deep h2o and drowning were non the same thing" (232).
• The narrator senses that Creole has some feel with this and that he's trying to show Sonny that it's condom to lose himself in his music for a lilliputian while. But Sonny's struggling a bit. He hasn't played in a while, he'south still a recovering drug addict, and he'south unsure of himself. His playing is stilted and unsure, and he sort of fights his style through the commencement set up.
• As presently as the first set is finished, Creole gets them started on the adjacent with a vocal called "Am I Blue." And all of a sudden, Sonny's playing changes. All of the musicians come together, similar they're a family, and the narrator describes it every bit a chat of sorts among the instruments.
• Sonny's playing is so good now that information technology sounds like he's "constitute, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new pianoforte" (235). And for just a moment, Sonny and the other musicians are all happy.
• But Creole is quick to "remind them that what they were playing was the blues" (236) and something in his playing forces the other musicians to change theirs.
• As this happens, the other musicians "all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played" (238). And as the narrator watches and listens to his brother, he sees Sonny "brand the song his. It was very cute because information technology wasn't hurried and it was no longer a lament" (238).
• Just something else happens to the narrator, too. Sonny's music makes him call up of their parents, of the expressionless uncle he never knew he had, and of his petty girl, Grace. He starts to cry.
• Suddenly the music stops and "Creole and Sonny let out their breath, both soaking wet, and grinning" (239). The narrator flags downwards one of the waitresses and orders drinks for the musicians. She brings a Scotch and milk for Sonny and puts information technology on the piano, but he doesn't seem to see it (at least that's what the narrator thinks). But as they're getting ready to starting time playing, Sonny drinks a footling, looks at the narrator, nods at him, and puts the glass back on the piano. Making a reference to a passage from the Old Testament, the narrator thinks to himself that the glass "glowed and shook in a higher place his blood brother'southward caput like the very cup of trembling" (239).

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Source: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/sonnys-blues/summary/sonnys-blues

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