"Sonny's Blues"

This is a story about life. The pain, suffering, hope, fear, loss, freedom and entrapment. This is what people go through when they are brought up in troubled situations. The narrator of this story is the older brother of Sonny, who is really the main focus of this tale.

There is very little one can understand from this story without having lived at least a part of it, pain, true pain, is incredibly hard to explain. Sonny himself explains to his brother at one point that he "can't really talk about it, not to you not to anyone", I don't think this is because he doesn't want his brother to understand but rather because unless you have been to a place where you are completely broken, you don't understand what it is like, you never really can.

This story is telling the reader one of the greatest truths in life, the harder the times, the farther a person has fallen, the more pain and suffering they have been through, the more they become something else. While they lose something in the process, like an animal leaving it's leg in a trap, they become something more then they were before at the same time. Everyone does this to a certain degree, everyone loses something, it's just that some lose more than others and that brings out more character in a person and you lose more of who you were before. Sonny says at one point that it is repulsive to think you have to suffer so much to get something so beautiful out of it.

Another point made in this story is that suffering is a huge part of life and as the narrator said "...there is no way not to suffer-- is there Sonny?" and while there isn't people make choices in an attempt to lessen the suffering. The point that Sonny makes through the whole story is that someone who has not made the same choices to lessen the suffering could not possibly understand what he has been through. He loses the boy that he was before but at the same time he becomes something more and gains abilities to do things and understand things that people who haven't been to the place where they were, as Sonny said, "Something I didn't recognize, didn't know I could be. Didn't know anybody could be." where he "Did terrible things" to himself and was quite literally "bad" for himself, could never possibly understand.

Everyone makes their own decisions in life and the choices they make, along with the choices that are made for them before they are even born, define who they are, and what they can do. Whether this makes what Sonny did right or not... who am I to judge the decisions he made to cope with the suffering in his life? Was his brother better off than him? or was he worse off cause he could never possibly share his reality with people the way Sonny did at the end of this story?