Throughout history, sibling relationships in different classes, religions, genders, and specific races of the human race have provided humans with an inherent empathizer. Being raised and shaped into distinct characters in the same environment and experiencing the same essential memories of childhood binds siblings together for better or for worse. Likewise, in “Sonny’s Blues”, written by James Baldwin, the narrator and his brother Sonny reunite through their shared origins and finally understand what it symbolizes to them and their entire community. The sibling relationship between the narrator and Sonny demonstrates two different ways in which people of the same background attempt to deal with their shared communities and memories to regain …show more content…
Because Sonny and the narrator originate from the same background that holds the same universal memories, readers are able to further analyze and understand what this specific community must suffer through and carry the burden of. When the narrator reflects upon the setting of his childhood, he remembers hopings “that there will never come a time when the old folks won't be sitting around the living room, talking about where they've come from, and what they've seen, and what's happened to them and their kinfolk. But something deep and watchful in the child (the narrator) knows that this is bound to end, is already ending….He knows that every time this happens he's moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It's what they've come from. It's what they endure “(7). As a child, the narrator was vaguely aware of the “darkness” that his community faced, which was the perpetual stigma of racism and slavery, and how it affected them all to this day. In turn, this knowledge of his community’s collective unconscious, the painful ideas and history that are rooted within each one, shape both his and Sonny’s actions and connection in life. The collective unconscious of his black society is further demonstrated through the revival meeting in the street that both Sonny and the narrator experience. When the narrator views this from an aloof position, he sees that “[a]s the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered