SOURCE: "Baldwin's 'Sonny's Blues': The Scapegoat Metaphor," in The University of Mississippi Studies in English, Vol. IX, 1991, pp. 189-98.

In the following essay, Robertson traces the development of the scapegoat metaphor in Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues."

In James Baldwin's only book of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, "Sonny's Blues" stands out as the best, most memorable. This story is both realistic and symbolic, part autobiography and part fiction. So memorable is "Sonny's Blues" that a student once put it at the top of a list of thirty stories read for a course in fiction. She commented, "The story haunts you; its beauty continues in your mind long after the original reading and discussion." The story's haunting beauty comes from our participation in the scapegoat metaphor that creates the intricate tracery which holds the story together, forming a graceful spiral, a pattern of correspondences which informs and entices...