sonnys blues :: essays research papers

At its best, James Baldwins fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, "Sonnys Blues," I was sitting in one of those massive strand bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The death three pages of "Sonnys Blues" are as good as it gets Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repress pain. Baldwin follows suit capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz in some of the most stunning prose Ive encountered.Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, its perhaps the most frustrating refreshful Ive ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and judging by the variety of sexual human relationships on display here, he must hav e plotted those intersections on graph paper before sitting down to write that he makes a fatal mistake kind of of being particularly insightful or even shocking, Another Country is preachy, sentimental, and, worst of all, boring.Rufus Scott is a young black man who makes his living playing drums in Harlem jazz clubs. When we first meet Rufus, he is wandering the streets, suffering from guilt over his treatment of Leona, a woman we later meet through flashbacks. Leonas and Rufuss relationship is based on a shared self-loathing he feels unworthy of the love of a white woman she has known only brutal relationships, having come to unfermented York after escaping from an abusive marriage in the South. Rufuss brutality eventually sends her to an asylum, an event that plagues Rufus, leading him to jump from the George Washington bridge at the end of chapter one. The remainder of the novel charts the effects of Rufuss suicide on the lives of those closest to him. The most interesting re lationship is between Ida, Rufuss younger sister, and Vivaldo, his best friend. Both are struggling artists she a singer, he a novelist. In Baldwins hands, they become a platform for long discourses on the legacies of racism. Before meeting Ida, Vivaldo has known black women only as sexual objects the squalid whores he frequented in Harlem. Ida has likewise known white men only as victimizers the men who leered at her and who broke her brothers spirit.