SOURCE: "James Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues': Complicated and Simple," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 353-57.

In the following essay, portions of which appeared in CLC-13, Murray explores themes of identity, loss, and transcendence in "Sonny's Blues," linking them with the story's key metaphors of light, dark, and water.

One boy was whistling a tune, at once very complicated and very simple, it seemed to be pouring out of him as though he were a bird, and it sounded very cool and moving through all that harsh, bright air, only just holding its own through all those other sounds.

In the world of "Sonny's Blues," the short story by James Baldwin, the author deals with man's need to find his identity in a hostile society and, in a social situation which invites fatalistic compliance, his ability to understand himself through artistic creation which is both individual...