Music, Addiction, and Understanding

     James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is probably my favorite story we've read so far. It was told from the point of view of Sonny's older brother; he grew up to a be a mature and respectable math teacher, who tries to understand his younger brother Sonny, an up and coming musician who is addicted to heroin. It seems to me that that the brothers grew up leading completely different lives, and the story is told from the narrator in a way to try and relate to his younger brother. When Sonny tells the narrator that he wants to play music for a living between paragraph 110-115, he seems suprised and uneasy, worrying about Sonny and if the people he meets playing music is the wrong crowd for him. Later on in the story, the older brother asks questions to Sonny about his heroin addiction. Between paragraph 200-205, speaking of the music scene and his addiction, Sonny says, "It's not so much to play, It's to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level...in order to keep from shaking to pieces." As a musician myself, I can relate to what he says here. I understand all the outside pressure from yourself and others, and how a lot of musicians find a crutch in drugs or whatever else to cope. I believe here is where the narrator begins to relate to Sonny, and at the end of the story when he hears Sonny play the blues in the night club, he feels his pain and his story in his music, and it's a great analogy on the power of music and the blues on a level of understanding.

Blog on Cathedral by Raymond Carver

     Going into this story knowing nothing about the author and only the title itself, I was worried this was some story from the 17th Century like we started with when I took a world literature at community college, but I was glad to find out this was more modern and more enjoyable for me to read. This story is essentially about a blind man who comes to visit a couple. The wife has been friends with the blind man for a long time, and I sense a lot of jealousy from the husband. At the beginning of the story he seemed very uneasy about him coming into his home, and he could sense the tension of feeling inferior to his wife because of him as he narrates the story. He must have felt like how his wife could be attracted to someone with a disability, when he was in perfect condition, though it seems the blind man was more kind to the wife than he was. Eventually, the husband becomes more comfortable with the blind man, and the husband wants to show him what a cathedral is as they are watching a T.V. program on the subject. They begin to draw a cathedral together, and at the end the husband closes his eyes, and tries to visualize their drawn cathedral in his mind. It's not like the husband goes from cynical and jealous of the blind man to a kind-hearted and sympathetic person, but it seems as though me makes an attempt to relate to him by closing his eyes, and visualizing the world around him.