SOURCE: "James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues': A Message in Music," in Negro American Literature Forum, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall, 1974, pp. 231-33.

In the following essay, Goldman discusses the main themes in "Sonny's Blues."

In "Sonny's Blues" theme, form, and image blend into perfect harmony and rise to a thundering crescendo. The story, written in 1957 but carrying a vital social message for us today, tells of two black brothers' struggle to understand one another. The older brother, a straight-laced Harlem algebra teacher, is the unnamed narrator who represents, in his anonymity, everyman's brother; the younger man is Sonny, a jazz pianist who, when the story opens, has just been arrested for peddling and using heroin. As in so much of Baldwin's fiction, chronological time is upset. Instead the subject creates its own form. In this story of a musician, four time sequences mark four movements while the leitmotifs of this symphonic...