Sonny's Blues- a short story by James Baldwin, depicting the lives of two brothers who are polar opposites in the way they think and go about their day-to-day activities.
The eldest brother, whose name is never stated, is an algebra teacher with a wife and three children- one of whom dies unexpectedly at the young age of two. He fought in the war and made something, at least according to him, of his life. His younger brother, Sonny, is a different story. He is like a lost puppy wandering aimlessly around, attempting to find something that will make sense to him- that will bring him peace. Sonny believes that peace can be found in music, specifically the genre of the blues, hence the title of the story. But in order to feel "alive", Sonny feels that he still needs something more, and he turns to drugs as an outlet. His life spirals out of control and takes a turn for the deep end, making his older brother realize just how much Sonny has been and is still going through- that the internal civil war within his heart is slowly poisoning him.
The two brothers fight- a lot. They argue over what Sonny is doing with his life, what is reasonable and unreasonable, and how heroin is affecting his life negatively and why he turned to it in the first place. The older brother just can't seem to understand why Sonny does what he does, and he can even cope with himself at times. But when Sonny convinces him to watch him play the blues with his band at a local nightclub, only then does the brother begin to understand the pain and loss Sonny and himself have felt throughout the years, and he became aware "that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky".
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