I gratefully propose my set of ideas for the critical research assignment, and the topic I am most interested in writing about. I chose to write about James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”, and his themes of ‘pursuing the essence to control one’s life in each of their own ways’. My essay will be promptly concentrated on two sets of subtopics and arguments; one is the clashing of two different philosophical ideas on how to correctly handle physical and mental indigence and the other is a disclose about how environmental factors play an important role in human upbringing, especially those that are classified as a social stigma. The Freudian concept that I will be using to support my argument would be the id, ego, and superego. To further elucidate, Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a story about two African-American brothers from the 1950’s Harlem, Manhattan, who witnessed the misery and poverty of living as part of the Black Community in their neighborhood. The older one is very much devoted to earning social credibility through responsibility and rational decision-making, while the younger one was blinded by illogical compliance with his own set of passion and artistic expression. These two viewpoints represent the id and the superego, as the narrator was focused on his devotion to making moral-based choices that tend to disregard his own happiness (representing the superego), and Sonny being someone who selfishly pursues the aspects of personal fulfillment (representing the id). In the end, Baldwin claimed that although each of these perceived notions has severe repercussions, forming synthesis (relating to the brothers forgiving each other) imposes the ideal control over one’s lifestyle, hence the representation of the ego.

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