The Narrator’s Father Character Analysis

The narrator’s father is also not alive in “Sonny’s Blues,” but through the narrator’s memories of him and his mother’s stories about him, Baldwin gives a glimpse of who he was. The narrator’s father is described as someone who could be hopeful and caring, but was also plagued by despair—he drank on weekends, eventually drinking himself to death. Though the narrator never knew this while his father was alive, the source of the narrator’s father’s torment was having witnessed the death of his own brother when a car of drunk white men ran him over on purpose. The narrator’s father suffered deeply from this event, but kept his suffering private, preferring to handle it by drinking and only confessing his feelings to his wife.