In Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, the narrator emphasizes morally-based choices in response to the endless suffering of life. Throughout the story, Baldwin pursues the narrator’s philosophy in-comparison to Sonny’s ideology through a series of fragmented story-telling. In the beginning, the narrator can’t help but feel “a special kind of ice” (Baldwin 1), alluding to an unsettling reaction when he saw his brother arrested, on par with realizing how easily he could’ve suffered the same faith as Sonny, by conceptualizing how fear and drugs destroyed Sonny’s life. Moreover, in Freudian terms, the narrator’s judgment towards Sonny represents the superego in its authoritative form, as our “God-given moral standard” overlaps any other agency in our conscience mind (Freud 3). This demonstrates how the narrator felt that Sonny’s irrational decisions of pursuing music and leaving Harlem are finally resurfacing to cause Sonny more agony, such as getting arrested. Ironically, Baldwin signifies how the narrator’s morally-based decisions suffered the same faith as Sonny’s; similarly to the relentless severity of the superego on an individual (Freud 4). This is shown by the imagery of the narrator’s home, illustrating how “it’s really just like the houses in which Sonny and I grew up” (Baldwin 6), demonstrating that the narrator is still living in the same condition similar to his childhood experience, the one thing he tried to stray away for his family. The author wanted to make it clear that the narrator never left that same tormenting image from his agonizing childhood, even though he devoted so much of his time to getting a good education to avoid poverty. The dread that he tried so hard to stray away led to an endless misery that seems to be inescapable, and thus he clings to the experience of being a teacher and having a stabled family to avoid the life of drugs and crime, only to see his dread rooted deeper in place (Jones 468). Ultimately, the older brother’s response to the endless suffering through pursuing education and self-sacrifices never halted the cycle of agony the brothers are always tormenting.

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