The novel The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, tells the story of the Vietnam War from the perspectives of three different characters. Fowler represents the British viewpoint and is also the narrator of the novel. Pyle gives the American...

For many years, audiences have seen art forms extend beyond their original categorisations into other artistic spheres – Pieter Bruegel’s painting inspiring William Carlos Williams’ Hunter in the Snow or Leonard Cohen’s music influenced by the...

Each year, residents of forgotten neighborhoods pay the price of being alive. In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin uses references to human vulnerability to express the impact of home environment on outlook and life experience. Through the actions of...

Music is a powerful language which speaks to us, moves us, and fills us with emotion. In Sonny's Blues, the voice of Jazz mediates the relationship between two brothers. As the older brother's appreciation of music grows, he understands better the...

James Baldwin provides several constructions of black masculinity through his two texts Everybody's Protest Novel and Sonny's Blues. Since this essay is comparing works from the same author, it is essential to look at what these constructions are...

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," the abundance of darkness reveals the beauty of light. Despite how uncomfortable and painful it is to be in the dark, the main character, Sonny empowers himself by stepping into the light and incorporating his...

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a tale of suffering. Placed in an environment that is “encircled by disaster” (Baldwin 1615), the narrator constantly attempts to escape from the suffering around him. He avoids all contact with those around him...

James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and “The Man Child” are both texts that demonstrate how the isolation of characters can yield overtly violent outcomes. Though the perspective from which Baldwin challenges dominant forces differs between...

Humans are made of the tangible; flesh and blood, muscles and bones, cells and nerves. The survival of man can be dissected into the purely scientific, the emotionless, the artless. The value of the anatomical can clearly not be understated, as...

Martin Luther King and James Baldwin lived in the era of racial inequality and the civil rights movement, an era when African-Americans were still fighting to find a place in society. In 1963, King wrote a famous letter from jail while in 1957;...

There is a worn-out old saying about how when a door closes, there will always be a window to crawl through instead. But what if the window has bars on it? Or what if it is too high for someone to reach without anyone to give them a boost, and no...

James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” is about the complicated relationship between two brothers. The tale opens with a nameless narrator discovering his brother, Sonny, had been imprisoned for the use and distribution of heroin. Until his...

The past is anything but mere history; it sheathes, surrounds, and encompasses us, as humans, as we forge on through life. Similarly, in two eminent American works of fiction - The Underground Railroad, The Cafeteria, and Sonny’s Blues - the past...

Drug abuse is one of the largest epidemics facing our world today. Through research, we have been able to get a better understanding of the factors that cause drug abuse and consequently drug addiction in the first place. Studies done specifically...

A Streetcar Named Desire and Blues for Mister Charlie are both concerned to a large extent with tensions between different ethnic groups and, since in both plays the ethnicity of each group defines its social position, different social groups as...

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the protagonist David grapples with his homosexuality, a part of him that he continually denies, and subsequently fails to repress. As David deals with his identity, he looks for and finds himself, his literal...

In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, David is a heterosexual man with homosexual desires. This desire to be with men leads him desensitized to how he actually feels when he is with all four of his lovers - male and female. Each and every...

Throughout Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin makes a series of references to David’s sense of fabricated manhood or masculinity impressed upon him by his father. In the first chapters, David alludes to the hollow jocularity between father and son. This...

The relationship between sex and power within literature is incredibly complex. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway features the main character Jake, who faces the relationship between sex and power via his impotence, as well as his love for a...

David is consumed by his inner conflict and confusion over personal sexual identity. This ambivalence causes him to neglect heteronormative family, relationship, and masculine norms, leaving him stuck in liminal spaces within society and...

James Baldwin’s work is often defined by an intersection of nationality and sexuality. In Giovanni’s Room, the motif of culture and country of origin is prominent, but difficult to interpret. A particularly dense passage occurs part two of this...

The emergent evolution in the traits of human personality, both physically and psychologically created a new and unique dimension to extend the nebulous boundaries of exploration. While grouting the breaches that occurred during the understanding...

I encountered a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself. - James Baldwin

James Baldwin's writings are most famous for their complexity of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies during 20th century America. His...

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact. - Jean-Paul Sartre

In the novel Giovanni's Room, author James Baldwin invites his readers to journey to Paris post-World War II. The San Francisco...