Questions for Close Reading and Analysis of Fictional Elements
Part of "Jazz and Literature"1
In a three to four page literary analysis essay, respond to one of the following essay questions. Your essay should
include an introduction with a strong thesis statement, body paragraphs with clear topic sentences, ample
textual support in the forms of quotations and summary, and logical analysis.
1. Carefully observe the details of the story's opening, how the narrator learns of his brother's downfall, where
he is at the time, the interaction with Sonny's friend, etc. How do these scenes help set up the conflicts in the
story? What are these central conflicts and how are they confronted and resolved?
2. How do events in the past, presented as flashbacks or as the narrator's recollections, help to develop the
plot, conflict, and/or characterization in "Sonny's Blues"? Consider the narrator's description of his and Sonny's
childhood, their lives on the Harlem streets, the Sunday dinners at home, the death of their uncle, the narrator's
last conversation with their mother, etc.
3.
Toward the end of the story, as he is trying to explain his addiction to heroin and his passion for music,
Sonny tells the narrator that everyone tries to find a way not to suffer, even the narrator himself. What are
examples of suffering in the community? What are the narrator's ways of coping with his pain and fear?
Sonny? Community members? What element consistently offers hope to the people of Harlem?
4. How would you describe the tone of the ending? What sort of resolution (if any) does the story or the
narrator come to? How does the narrator grow and develop? How does Baldwin’s prose help the reader
connect with the emotions of the characters? What imagery or motifs serve this purpose?
5. Sonny's Blues is populated by powerful images and motifs, specifically the use of darkness and light, and
inside and out. Trace a series of these images and discuss how the narrator uses them to create a particular
atmosphere and to help tell his story. What do they symbolize? How do they develop the theme?
6. A works setting refers to both the time (historical and also time of day or year) and the place
(geographical, as in New York, Harlem, Greenwich Village, and also local, as in setting certain scenes in
subways, apartments, dark roads, etc.) in which the actions of the story occur. How do Baldwin's choices
about setting help you understand the theme or meaning of the story?
8. The word "it" populates the conversation between the narrator and the friend. What is the pronoun
standing in for in these sentences? Where else does the narrator begin to rely on the pronoun "it" to help him
make sense of Sonny's story? Why do you think Baldwin felt that the word "it" was better than its specific
referent in these cases?
9. How do the minor characters in the story function to help develop the story, the characters of Sonny and his
brother? (Isabel, Sonny's childhood friend, their parents, their uncle, the jazz musicians at the Village club).
10. Consider carefully the narrator's language in the climactic scene, when Sonny plays the piano. What
elements of style can you identify here, and what is their effect? What is the nature of the epiphany the
narrator experiences here, and how does it connect with episodes recounted earlier in the story -- e.g. the
mother's story of the father and his brother?
11. What statement does the story make about the relationship of art and music to life or about the relationship
of art/music to suffering?
12. Explore the implicit intersections between the effects of drug use, music and religion in Sonny's Blues.
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Adapted from Ann Fleischmann and Andy Jones