Research Guides: Sonny's Blues: Critical Articles

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The biblical foundation of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"
Examines the biblical origins of imagery and behavior in "Sonny's Blues".
A Kind of Joy: Laughing and Grinning through “Sonny’s Blues”
The protagonists in James Baldwin’s 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” are constantly smiling and laughing. The story’s narrator notices these gestures and utilizes them to grasp at clarity when clarity seems out of reach. This article examines the narrator’s focus on this duo of facial expressions which reliably denote positive emotion. The relationship we maintain between our smiles and our laughter structures many of the narrator’s interactions with the story’s hero. More though, this relationship between smiles, laughter, and a kind of joy resembles the relationship Baldwin has described between the blues and the world this genre of music depicts.
Learning to listen to 'Sonny's Blues'
Examines the narrative uses of music to communicate and learning to listen as the central goal of the story.
Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin
from Introduction to Literary Context: American Short Fiction
Troubled reading: 'Sonny's blues' and empathy
This article uses a discussion of Baldwin's short story 'Sonny's blues' as a means of exploring reading and approaches to drug literature. It considers the possibility of understanding Baldwin's fictional text as a statement on reading social as well as subjective 'problems' as universal across contexts. Using conclusions gleaned from a detailed reading of the primary text, as well as the contributions of others to the field, it argues for the importance of reading, as audience and as scholars, with the capacity to allow for the transformation of problematic subjective experience such as drug addiction into artistic expression with value beyond its initial context.

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