Sonny's Blues

Sonny's Blues was easily my favorite book that we read so far. Some reasons for this was this book was realistic, interesting, and very smooth to read because of the narrator. When I read this short story, I felt like I was in the story the way the narrator describes the experiences he has, and his family has. This book has a lot of suffering in it. The big message of this book is that drugs are bad for you, but it does it in a unique way. It lets the readers sympathize with the characters in the story because it is so realistic. There are so many people that are either addicted to some kind of drug, or is very close to someone that has this problem. It's very sad and unfortunate, but this story tries to tell us that using drugs to escape reality and suffering will just bring more pain and suffering to your life. In this story, everyone is suffering in some way, but choose different ways to handle it. For instance, the narrator is suffering because of his brother's problem and the loss of his little girl. He lives life day by day having the strength to keep all this emotional hurt inside of him and not getting caught up with the bad things. His brother chose a different path by shooting up heroin all the time. I respect his brother though because he knew he had a problem, and he tried to end it by leaving to go to the military. When he came back, he got into the same things and had to get help. I respect him because even though we don't know if he will continue to do heroin, he's trying really hard not to, and his brother describes him as a good person. He just made some bad decisions in his life, but that doesn't make him a bad guy. Also, even though they didn't know it the whole time, their father was suffering because of the loss of his brother. He just didn't show it or tell them because he left all the tears and conversations for his wife. That's the way he dealt with the pain by sharing how he felt with his family, and leaving the anger inside.
Next, I just want to briefly talk about Sonny's interest in jazz and how it impacted the story. Jazz music is very soothing, peaceful, and soulful, but it is not for everyone. The narrator never understood Sonny's interest in jazz until the end of the story when he watched him play. He had a big connection with his brother when he got to live inside Sonny's world for a little while. I think when he watched Sonny watch the random revival sing on the street and when he went with Sonny to see him play helped their relationship out trememdously and was an amazing way to end the story. If someone read this story that was going through a problem similar to this, it would give them hope or at least something to live for. It's like Sonny kind of found his way a little bit, found his passion. It seems as if jazz was the new thing he could do to escape reality without having to hurt or dissapoint anyone including himself.