Sonny's Blues
... barmaid and thought to himself, "One saw the little girl, one sensed the doomed still struggling woman beneath the battered face of a semi-whore." Despite the barmaid being a grown woman, you could still see an innocent and childlike way about her that hid beneath the hurting and scarred soul that sought for love in the wrong places. When the narrator finally sees his brother, he says, "The life, whatever it was had made him older and thinner and it had deepened the distant stillness in which he had always moved." In my opinion, the narrator was saying that he could see the physical effect left behind on Sonny by the lifestyle he led. I also feel that Baldwin was saying that his brother had always been the kind that kept to himself, but now the vague distance between them had widened. In another example of the writer's craft, he says "The seven years difference in our ages lay between us like a chasm: I wondered if these years would ever operate between us as a bridge." Baldwin's character believes between the brothers' ages was a hindrance in their relationship. He somehow hoped that as time went on that the very thing that caused such a gap would bring them together. He might have thought that maybe his brother would come to him because of the wisdom he obtained as in being older and more experienced. When the brothers arrived at the housing project, the narrator describes the building "as a parody of the good, clean, faceless life- God only knows that the people who live in it do their best to make it a parody." The narrator feels that the project has the appearance of a luxury building, yet the people who live in it are going through the motions or are in denial about the true condition of the building but this seems to be an illusion. In my opinion, I believe that when the narrator's mother said, "you got to hold on to your brother," she was saying that no matte...