Open Your Ears: Sonny's Blues

    I chose to write this blog post on Sonny's Blues because I found it very captivating and thought it was a very touching story. While reading I found that there were many recurring themes throughout the whole story, but the one thing I thought was very dominate and felt that it impacted the whole story was "listening". In the beginning it mentions that the Narrator listens to the boy laughing outside of his window and how it captivates him and brings him back to a much later time when him and his brother were children. I found this to be a key factor which would later play another role in the story. 

    As I continued to read, there were numerous occasions where listening played the role of different senses and feelings, which I believed to be very powerful and added depth to his story. For example, when the Narrator is talking about how his wife knew something was wrong with their daughter when she heard the daughter fall but heard no tears. Fear was immediately was invoked in her and she rushed to her child to find that she was in desperate need of help. At the very end when Sonny invites the Narrator to come and finally listen to him play his music, the Narrator sees his parents as well as his little girl who had died.

     Even though the Sonny and the Narrator were constantly butting heads, its when the Narrator listened to his brothers music that he was able to see who he really was and understand his suffering as well as accept his own.