A Close Reading Assignment on Baldwins Sonny Blues

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21 February 2017
A Close Reading of Baldwin’s Sonny Blues
In Baldwin’s short story it is easily noticeable how some themes presented itself and helped build the main plot of the story and also the environment that lies beyond it. Some examples of these themes include art, pain, suffering, and as the title presents, music. However, simply utilizing these themes would not be fairly sufficient to produce the certain emotions that the author is trying to espouse from the reader, just as how simply stating the word “death” would not imply connotations of fear and dread from those who hear it. Thus, I believe that it is important to see how the different parts of the Sonny Blues have been pieced together, which made it one of the best short pieces ever written.
As the story begins, what I immediately notice is the author’s way of utilizing and piecing together strong descriptive words and metaphors in order to convey what the narrator is feeling and/or thinking. One of the great examples of this is the phrase “A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long”. In my opinion, this approach used by Baldwin helps the readers make vivid descriptions in their own minds about what the narrator is feeling. However, I believe that the greatest impact does not lie on how these figures of speech were utilized. Rather, it was the use of first person perspective that pa...