Character Analysis

For my critical blog I chose to do a character analysis for "Sonny's Blues". I will be doing this for both Sonny and for the narrator who was left nameless in the story. The narrator was Sonny's older brother. Throughout the story, the brother's personalities develop into a completely different personality. This is because both of the brothers are able to see each other from a different perspective.

Sonny is the kind of person that would come across as rebellious and challenging. He becomes rebellious because his father dies and his brother goes away to war so he is left to grow up without any masculine role models to model his life after. He gets mixed in with the wrong crowd and ends up in rehab because of his heroin addiction. He is a musician and has a different perspective of the world. Sonny in the end replaces his heroin addiction with an addiction to music. Drugs and Music does the same thing for him. That was something his brother couldn't understand without going and personally listening to his brother play.

Sonny's brother on the other hand is responsible and caring. He cares about his brother's future and wants the best for him. He does have a problem with making promises that he does not or will eventually fulfill. He needs a lot of prompting in order to fulfill his promises. In the end he becomes more understanding of the reasons why his brother behaves the way he does and begins to respect his brother as a musician rather than treating him like a child.