James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues"

This piece is so beautifully written and evokes many different emotions in about thirty pages. When I first started reading this story, I thought it was going to be about a man mourning someone close to him. The way the piece begins you almost do not want to know what happened to Sonny. You know he is close to the narrator and at first I thought Sonny might have been a student of the narrator before finding out he is his brother. As the story progresses I begin to feel this is a story about the loss of innocence, childhood, and the sense of possibility felt when being young. When the narrator is sitting in his classroom and hears the children laughing around him he feels resentful. The students are carefree and the responsibilities of being an adult have not been experienced by them. Juxtaposing the students' laughter are the feelings of the narrator. They are young and carefree, while he is experiencing emotional turmoil due to his brother's arrest. The passage below invokes these feelings.

I listened to the boys outside, downstairs, shouting and cursing and laughing. Their laughter struck me for perhaps the first time. It was not the joyous laughter which-God knows why-one associates with children. It was  mocking and insular, its intent was to denigrate. It was disenchanted, and in this, also, lay the authority of their  curses. Perhaps I was listening to them because I was thinking about my brother and in them I heard my brother.  And myself. (76)

Baldwin utilizes the theme of light versus darkness heavily in this story, and is eloquently used to represent the impending loss of youth before the reality of adulthood descends. A beautiful part of the story is when the children are sitting with the elderly after church. He says, "Everyone is looking at something a child can't see." (83) The narrator is referring to the darkness outside the window the adults are well familiar with. The adults know the darkness will always be there. The children are frightened of the darkness and close their eyes to it. As long as they feel the presence of the adult there with them there is this sense of comfort, but the child knows this comfort will not be present forever. The narrator says, "But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light." (83) 

Words Cited: 

Baldwin, James. "Sonny's Blues." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th. Alison Booth, Kelly Mays. New York:    W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. 75-101. Print.

Photo: http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2010/08/15/james-baldwin-sonnys-blues-extract/

Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"

At the beginning of Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," the narrator is presented as a callous, jealous man. He is uncomfortable with the thought of a blind man, who is very close to his wife, coming into his home. He is even more jealous of the relationship between the man and his wife. The blind man, and the narrator's wife have a connection spanning years. Robert is her confidant, an almost therapist she can share her deepest feelings with without judgement.  Robert's responses are so highly valued that once the narrator's wife almost played Robert's opinion of him, but due to some distraction he was never able to hear what he thought. Although the narrator claims to not be worried about not knowing Robert's opinion of him I believe this is false due to the level of tension experienced once he arrives. The narrator does not know how to act with a blind man in his home, and his wife grows increasingly frustrated with him. "Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV. My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil." (38) 

The narrator holds many stereotypes toward the blind man. He says, "I remember having read somewhere that the blind didn't smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn't see the smoke they exhaled." (37). He is also disgusted by the appearance of the man's eyes and states another of his stereotypes. "I'd always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else's eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris and...the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing...Creepy." (36) 

It is not until the end of the story that we see the narrator and Robert connect by drawing the cathedral together. By partaking in this activity together, the narrator is able to let go of his predisposed notion of Robert. Robert is a vital figure to both the wife and the narrator in this story. For the wife, she is able to express all thoughts and feelings to him. For the narrator, Robert provides a glimpse to what his life is like for him allowing the narrator to overcome the stereotypes he held at the beginning of the story.  

Words Cited:

Carver, Raymond. "Cathedral." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th. Alison Booth, Kelly Mays. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. 32-44. Print. 

Photos: http://gordonlisheditedthis.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/cathedral-raymond-carver/
            http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/how-to-draw-cathedrals.htm