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Allusions
Flashbacks
Explanation and Analysis—Sonny’s Backstory:
While “Sonny’s Blues” begins and ends in the present day of the story, there is an extended flashback in the middle. The following passage—which comes as the narrator is eating dinner with his family and Sonny after picking Sonny up from prison—captures the moment that the story switches from the present of the story to the past:
I was trying to find out something about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell me he was safe.
“Safe!” my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying to move to a neighborhood which might be safer for children. “Safe, hell! Ain’t no place safe for kids, nor nobody.”
He always went on like this, but he wasn’t, ever, really as bad as he sounded, not even on weekends, when he got drunk.
In the opening two lines of this passage, the narrator is at the dining table with his family and Sonny, asking questions in order to “find out something about [his] brother” and learn that “he was safe” from relapsing on drugs now that he is out of prison. The word “safe” then seems to trigger a memory in the narrator of his father “grunting” the word “safe” in a sarcastic manner when discussing where to move their family when the narrator and Sonny were kids.
As the flashback goes on, the narrator gets more and more lost in thoughts, sharing the story of how his parents died, how he was forced to become like a parent to Sonny—arranging for him to live at his wife’s family’s house—and how Sonny ran away to become a musician and became addicted to drugs. This flashback is critical in helping readers understand the cycles of suffering in the narrator’s family, as well as the tough family bonds that held them together even through extreme suffering.
Related Themes:
