Discussion
Questions for Sonny’s Blues
Group
members:
Be sure to support your responses to the questions below
with clear reasons as well as specific evidence (details, quotes, scene
summaries) from the story itself
1) Who is telling this
story and where/when is it set?
2) Describe the
story’s plot. (Plot = sequence of
events: first x happens; then y; then w; and so on.)
3) Describe the narrator, Sonny’s brother. What does he do for a living? What kind of guy is he? etc.
4) Describe
Sonny. What does he value, what are his
problems, etc.
5) What's the brother's problem with Sonny?
Consider this passage:
"All this was carrying me some place I didn't want to go. . .It filled everything, the
people, the houses, the music, the dark,
quicksilver barmaid, with menace. . ."
What's the "menace"?
What danger is this brother confronting?
5) Describe Sonny's relationship to music. How does he feel about it? What
does it do for him? Consider
this passage, in which Sonny describes some street singers: ". . .the music seemed to soothe a
poison out of them; and time seemed,
nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing
back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last."
Consider also this passage, in which the brother observes
one of the musicians playing on stage with Sonny near the end of the
story: "He was having a dialogue
with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to
leave the shoreline and strike out for
the deep water." What is meant
by “deep water”?
5) Who is this story primarily about? Support your answer with reasons and evidence
from the story itself.
6) What is this
story primarily about? Support your answer with reasons and evidence from the
story itself.
7) What perspective on art can be generated from this
story? Recall our "perspectives cone" in class recently.