The Symbolic Use of Light and Dark in James Baldwins Sonnys Blues Ess

The Symbolic Use of write down and Dark in James Baldwins blokes discolor In James Baldwins Sonnys Blues a pair of pals try to make sense of the urban declination that surrounds and fills them. This quest to puzzle out the truth of the shadows within their hearts and on the streets takes on a great importance. Baldwin meets his audience at a middle(a) mark Sonny has already fallen into drug map, and is now act to return to a clean life with his brothers aid. The narrator must counterbalance attempt to understand and make peace with his brothers drug use in advance he can extend his help and heart to him. Sonny and his brother both struggle for acceptance. Sonny wants desperately to explain himself bit likewise trying to stay afloat and out of drugs. Baldwin amplifies these struggles with a continuous emblematical motif of light and darkness. Throughout Sonnys Blues there is a distributive sense of darkness which represents the reality of life on the streets of Harlem. The darkness is sometimes ethical but usually sobering and sometimes fearful, just as reality may be scary. Light is not simply a stereotypical good, rather it is a complex consciousness, an awareness of the dark, and somehow, within that experience there lies hope. Baldwins motif of light and darkness in Sonnys Blues is about the sometimes painful nature of reality and the power gained from seeing it. Baldwins use of the symbols light and darkness seem at first stereotypical. Light is the good while dark is the bad, but after several uses it is clear that the writer has a more complex idea. The first reference to light occurs while the narrator is thinking over the recently learned news that Sonny has been jailed. I didnt want to believe that Id ever see m... ...shes a symbolic motif of light and darkness to illustrate the duality of the brothers world. Darkness represents reality, much cold, sometimes comforting, while light is the hope that sees them through. Together Sonny and his brother will face the darkness with a light and their hopes, making the caustic a little less foreboding, creating a reality they can carry with. At the end of the story the narrator sits in the bar ceremonial his brother receive his applause and sends him a drink. He comments, I adage the girl put a scotch and milk on come about of the piano for Sonny . . . as they began to play again, it glowed and shook above my brothers ear like the very cup of trembling, (439). Dark and light united in a drink of life, trembling with tenacity. Works Cited Baldwin, James. Sonnys Blues. The Oxford Book of American myopic Stories 1992 409 - 439.