This image depicts a man starting at close to nothing then turning into an almost complete person. This to me represents the theme Baldwin was displaying in “Sonny’s Blues”. Children in Harlem start with nothing; they have a limit put on them at birth and the only reality left to face is the darkness of their city. However, through reading “Sonny’s Blues” we find the narrator and Sonny himself have grown into people who may be considered to have escaped this horror; but at the cost leaving a lingering part much much like an animal in a trap( Baldwin 5). Harlem is the place it was at the time had the opposite an individual would hope for, you started broken and had to build your self to mean something.
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