In "Sonny's Blues" we see the relationship of two brothers, both from two very different world emerge into something deeper. Both deal with their two different lives, one chooses to go about it more traditionally, and be a school teacher, the other finds himself caught in the world of jazz and drugs. Sonny's addiction drives the family together but at the same time shows us just how apart they are. Baldwin could achieves this emotional response from the reader when he writes, "I felt just like I did the day I found out my brother was doing Heroin." Most of the general population has not had this experience. Therefore, when Baldwin uses the ice to describe the pain as a feeling that will not go away despite the fact that he must teach his students algebra, the reader feels exactly what Sonny's brother is feeling at the time, dealing with his addiction One example other than the "ice metaphor" is when Sonny and his brother are riding in a cab and they head uptown in New York City, towards Harlem. The two brothers ride silently in the cab as they were reflecting upon Harlem where they had both grown up. Both Sonny and the Narrator are looking for an "escape" from Harlem. The narrator feels that he has escaped by becoming a school teacher. Sonny had tried to escape from Harlem through drug use and eventually finds his true "escape" through music. While the two brothers are riding in this cab together the narrator comes to a revelation about their differences which is eloquently written by Baldwin, "Yet as the cab moved uptown through streets which seemed, with a rush, to darken with dark people, and as I covertly studied Sonny's face it came to me that what we were both seeking through our separate cab windows was that part of us which had been left behind"(53). This is another example of the critical use of the metaphor in order for the reader to feel the same emotions that th
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