Research Paper on:
Language and Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
American Dream of prosperity seemed possible -- as long as you were white. Merry-go-rounds used to have a brass ring that you could reach out and grab and, thereby,  get a free ride. American culture held a shiny brass ring of promise and hope and then said anyone with a black skin could not have it. This is  the cultural situation that Baldwin addresses in his tale of two brothers. Each brother attempts to survive in his own way. The oldest brother, the unnamed narrator, has chosen the  safe, respectable life of a teacher. Sonny, on the other hand, copes by using his musical talent, and, in so doing, he achieves a form of agency over  his own life and expression (Sherard 692). Baldwin dramatizes how the older brother comes to understand this through his expert use of language. Using metaphor and simile, Baldwins language  becomes analogous to the jazz that Sonny plays, informing the reader, as well as the older brother, about the whole genre of African American expression that is called the  blues and why it particularly expresses the life of black people at this time. The story opens with the narrator learning that his brother has been arrested by reading  about it in the morning paper on the subway on his way to work. Sonny "had been picked up, the evening before, in a raid on an apartment downtown, for  peddling and using heroin. The opening makes it clear that there is a gulf of understanding between the brothers. The narrator comments that Sonny "was wild, but he wasnt  crazy" (Baldwin 409). The older brother saw, but did not want to acknowledge what was happening. Looking at his students, he realizes that Sonny was probably not much older