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James BaldwinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
One of the major recurring symbols in “Sonny’s Blues” is darkness. The narrator uses darkness to obliquely describe the struggles that he and other Black people live through, especially those owing to being born into a life of racism and poverty. The use of darkness as a metaphor illustrates how racism takes a psychological toll on its victims. The first mention of darkness comes toward the beginning of the story, as the narrator looks at his students:
All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone (18).
When the narrator refers to darkness, he principally means the first sense described in this passage—“the darkness of their lives” (18). Though the narrator does not explicitly state what this darkness is, he implies that the darkness stems from the continual suffering caused by systemic racism in the United States. “Sonny’s Blues” was written in the first years of the civil rights movement, when Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutional racism kept most Black people caught in a life of poverty and hardship with little opportunity to escape.
By James Baldwin
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A Talk to Teachers
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Blues for Mister Charlie
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Giovanni's Room
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Going To Meet The Man
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
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I Am Not Your Negro
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If Beale Street Could Talk
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If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?
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Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son
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No Name in the Street
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Notes of a Native Son
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Stranger in the Village
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The Amen Corner
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The Fire Next Time
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The Rockpile
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