“Sonny’s Blues”: A Spiritual Theme

With ‘it’ being the starting point of the brothers’ sacred conquest. Passenger status is obvious from Sonny’s letter, when he writes to his brother, “I feel like a man who’s been trying to climb up out of some deep, real deep and funky hole…I guess I was afraid of something or I was trying to escape from something…” (43) Interestingly, the narrator, and brother, has also been booked on this voyage. In the end, Sonny’s performance becomes his testimony and his sermon.

The whole essence of this story and its resounding divine theme is based on the use of music to symbolize a higher power or supreme deity, GOD. In nearly every use of these two words, or their variations and synonyms, an inference can be realized; the motif is to be accepted in the sense of spiritual connotation. Ultimately, the journey culminates at the nightclub. It kept melting…, but it never got less. Sonny receives his salvation, he is no longer lost. Light and dark, or conjugates there of, transcend the language of the entire story. To validate the sense the brother has of being cast into the throws of darkness and damnation, consider his words: “A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly…It was a special kind of ice. The allusion by the author to the biblical ‘cup of trembling’ is symbolic of the ceremony and display of submission practiced in the religious ritual called baptism. The brother has found himself in the same plight, spiritually, as Sonny. Alluding to the biblical symbol of the cup, the brothers are the source of each other’s redemption and as such they are also each other’s protector.