Writing this critical analysis research paper was quite an experience. I chose the story, ” Sonny’s Blues” to write my essay on because it’s a story that focuses on how the setting of Harlem impacted the protagonist. I went to school in Harlem for 4 years and will spend the next 4 years in Harlem. So I kind of connect with what the narrator was talking about when he explained the kind of neighborhood Harlem was. I saw it all in Harlem, it obviously isn’t the best place. You won’t see a civilized society around there most of the time. So when I read this story, I kind of understood where Sonny was coming from, and how he dealt with it was inspiring. Hopefully, the readers will see how Sonny turned his life around by following his passion.

  The genre of my essay is informative,  I hope the readers can grasp how art transformed Sonny’s life and how the Freudian concepts played a role in changing Sonny’s life. Sonny went from being called a hoodlum to playing the piano with a band at a club. I hope the readers also understand the 3 Freud concepts I mentioned, which were sublimation, repression, and artistic gift. Furthermore, the tone I set in my essay was formal, thorough, and direct. I talked about how the narrator reacted to Sonny being a drug addict, all the way to Sonny using his talent to play the piano to achieve freedom. Readers can understand the roadblocks colored people faced in Harlem in the 1950s and the road the less fortunate had to take.

The audience I aim for is anyone with an interest in the lives of African Americans in Harlem during the 1950s. They can comprehend the hardships they went through to succeed. Overall, this essay was probably the hardest out of all of them because there were a lot of points to mention in the essay. I always had to keep it in the back of my head to write this essay as if the reader had never read the story before. So I had to go into detail about the Freudian concepts and how they were applied. I had to make sure all the characters were introduced correctly and many more. I had trouble with comma splices and I believe I understand them better after reading the articles. I learned a lot of stuff that will help me in the future when writing essays.

I came upon this post on Instagram and I believe it fits Bitzer’s, “ a work is rhetorical because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind.”(Bitzer 4). This post is talking about how many people are avoiding the vaccine for ridiculous reasons. It has exigence because it is bringing awareness about the vaccine. The audience is very large since the whole world knows about the vaccine, so a lot of people have an interest in this. There is a rhetorical constraint because this is sort of a jab towards anti-vaxxers and this NBA player is known for losing family members due to the coronavirus so many people agree with what he has to say.

Weaknesses: I feel like that weakness in my essay was adding too many lengthy quotes. I should have added more concise quotes to explain my thinking. Also, I think I should have mentioned the yellow wallpaper connection in the first body paragraph. 

Halloween weekend: I worked over the weekend. I saw a lot of little kids trick or treating and it brought back memories. I don’t trick or treat now because im too old now, but I enjoy seeing the children’s faces when they get candy. It was also very cold on Halloween, literally freezing. I saw kids crying on the street probably because they got no candy.

Stylistic Choices: James Baldwin used first person pov and a nameless character to make this short story. It was also very poetic because there were multiple paragraphs that gave musical vibes.


Favorite part of Sonny Blues: My favorite part of “Sonny Blues” is how the plot develops and Sonny finally gets to do what he wants. He’s been through many obstacles and finally finds peace in the end. This supports Baldwin’s critique of society because it showed how colored people struggled to fulfill their goals due to all the roadblocks they faced in the 1950s. Black people didn’t have all the opportunities and access to education like other people, so they had to turn to something else.

                                                               Elegance of Art

    People are often born into different kinds of situations with different kinds of opportunities. Some people struggle to make ends meet, whereas others are born with money. In the 1950s, many African-Americans in Harlem dealt with discrimination and social injustices. Due to these roadblocks, the only way African Americans could escape was through drugs or music. Sonny, the narrator’s brother, didn’t have a proper education and felt taking drugs was the only route he could take. Through Freud’s concepts of artistic gift, repression, and sublimation, James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” expresses how art, which in this case is Sonny playing on the piano, is used to escape Harlem’s discrimination against colored people.

     Harlem in the 1950s was a time where colored people were being oppressed and had limited opportunities. Sonny was a victim of this oppressed society and according to the narrator, Sonny’s brother, Harlem, was “filled with rage” (Baldwin 1). When the narrator saw Sonny getting locked up for using heroin, the narrator was in a state of shock. This made the narrator suppress his feelings, he stated, “I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time…I told myself that Sonny was wild, but he wasn’t crazy”(Baldwin 1). Sonny was dealt with two choices, which were either the drug life or the education route. He chooses to take drugs because that’s what he believes will make him survive another 24 hours. As soon as the narrator hears about the news of Sonny getting caught with heroin, he starts to suppress it by questioning if it’s true and making up excuses to cope with who Sonny has become. By doing this, the narrator pushes those thoughts out of his conscious mind (Freud 2215). Hence, this makes his memories repressed, and now those memories live in his unconsciousness (Freud 2215). Elaine R. Ognibene from St. John’s School in Rochester states, “It is not Sonny but he fears for if he is faced with a condition of dissonance: his carefully ordered middle-class existence cannot acknowledge a drug addict brother, yet somehow he feels vaguely responsible” (Ognibene 36). The purpose of the narrator repressing the thoughts of Sonny in jail is because the narrator is a respectable algebra teacher, yet his brother still fits the stereotypes that were set for black children in Harlem. Which we’re getting called crackheads, hoodlums, and many other racial slurs. This hurts the narrator, and he fears that he will be associated with Sonny’s mistake after all the hard work he put in. Thus, he has repressed those thoughts because he did not want to be put in the same group as Sonny.

     Moreover, Baldwin indicated the importance of jazz, and how it drove Sonny away from Harlem. Sonny mentioned how he felt trapped in Harlem because it was a filthy neighborhood. He stated, “But the reason I wanted to leave Harlem so bad was to get away from drugs. And then, when I ran away, that’s what I was running from. When I came back, nothing had changed, I hadn’t changed, I was just – older” (Baldwin 18). Sonny did not want to return to his old lifestyle of taking drugs and being a lowlife, so he went on to follow his passion, which was to play jazz on the piano. According to Freud, this is Sonny using his artistic gift, his talent to play the piano, to redirect his drug addiction (2235). In other words, the artistic gift is a talent you are born with, you cannot learn it over time. In this case, playing the piano is Sonny’s artistic gift (Freud 2235). When Sonny and his brother were having a conversation about Sonny’s career, Sonny got mad, the narrator says, “I was beginning to realize that I’d never seen him so upset before.” (Baldwin 10). Sonny got frustrated because his brother was not taking anything Sonny said seriously. The narrator believed Sonny was impacted by Harlem’s negative influence on colored people and that Sonny would never change his lifestyle. The art of jazz music works as an outlet for Sonny to let his feelings and emotions out. He had felt that he could not get himself to share with his brother.

     Moreover, Freud considers sublimation a salutary and sophisticated way of dealing with urges that may be disturbing, rather than doing something that can be harmful to society. (2215). Sublimation allows people to channel that energy into things that are beneficial (Freud 2215). Sonny sublimated his urge to take drugs by playing jazz on the piano, which was socially justified in Harlem. The conflict was that the narrator was never acquainted with Sonny’s addiction, and as a consequence, he failed to understand him and his passion for music. Eva Kowalska from the University of Johannesburg states, ” Sonny’s music is acceptable as the counterpart to his addiction, a glimmer of life within the desperation of his situation” ( Kowalska n.p.g). Sonny’s passion for music is substituting for his drug addiction. The power of art in the early 1950s helped colored people find an outlet to channel their energy into. 

    When one reads the short story “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, one can comprehend the hardship colored people faced in Harlem during the 1950s. Other options, such as art, were considered where they felt they had freedom. Art has transformed Sonny from a drug addict to a jazz musician. Playing the piano was an outlet for Sonny to redirect his feelings and emotions. Harlem was not the right place for Sonny; it discriminated against colored people and didn’t have many opportunities for people to succeed. Harlem made the narrator feel that he had failed as a role model because he couldn’t save his brother from being a drug addict. It made the narrator repress his thoughts because he didn’t want to be associated with his brother, Sonny. The art of playing the piano was a gift Sonny was born with, and it has helped him steer his life in the right direction. 

                          How would you treat an illness you had no clue about?

   Freud strived to depict the extraordinary nature of psychoanalysis throughout his lectures. He mentioned how back then doctors would not properly treat patients that did not have organic diseases. Freud felt that this problem needed to be addressed, so his colleague, Dr. Breuer, and he focused on the illness called hysteria. Dr. Breuer genuinely cared about his patient even though he had no idea how to treat hysteria. Consequently, in “The Yellow Wallpaper” John had different beliefs about the illness, which resulted in madness. John and Freud shared different beliefs when it came to treating illnesses.

  The main idea that Freud wanted his audience to understand was that doctors did not properly handle patients with mental illnesses and that Breuer was the one to break that tradition. Freud believed doctors treated patients with hysteria as if their life wasn’t in danger and they would return back to their normal health. He thought that this attitude towards these patients was because they had no knowledge about these illnesses, stating that “It is noticeable that his attitude towards hysterical patients is quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases. He does not have the same sympathy for the former as for the latter.” (Freud 2201). Freud is emphasizing how the doctors showed no pity to patients that didn’t have organic disease. Contrarily, Dr. Breuer’s attitude toward these patients was different from the other doctors. He wasn’t sure how to treat hysteria but yet he showed sympathy and interest in his patient. Moreover, Breuer later came up with the treatment known as the talking cure that made the symptoms start to disappear. Freud realized that Breuer was actually taking hysterical patients seriously, saying that, “ Never before had anyone removed a hysterical symptom by such a method or had thus gained so deep an insight into its causation.”(Freud 2203). Freud saw Dr.Breuer’s benevolent examination towards his patients with hysteria, and how they both shared similar views.

    Freud’s criticism of doctors is also depicted in the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” we learn that the narrator is ill and has “a slight hysterical tendency”(Gilman 648). Her husband John, who is a physician does not truly believe the narrator is ill and thinks she will heal by herself. This is exactly what Freud was concerned about when he said, “ He cannot understand hysteria, and in the face of it he is himself a layman” (Freud 2201). Freud is acknowledging that doctors back then had no idea how to treat illness like hysteria, so they decided not to help at all. Furthermore, John uses the resting cure on his wife only to make it worse, instead of actually helping he treats her as if she’s a child. The narrator states, “ There is something strange about the house – I can feel it. I even said so to John one moonlight evening, but he said what I felt was a draught, and shut the window.”(Gilman 648). This backs up Freud’s criticism of doctors as John is quite dismissive of his patient/wife’s needs and drives her mental health down the drain.

   Reading Freud’s lectures made his attitude towards doctors seem reasonable. Mental health is important and should be taken more seriously, as you can perceive in “ The Yellow Wallpaper” what happens if you don’t. Freud has made immense strides in understanding hysteria with psychoanalysis, which helped set a precedent for future doctors. A doctor should always have an interest in their patient no matter the illness or obstacle. Freud understood the significance of mental health and helped steer the direction to make others understand too.

                                                Works Cited Page

Freud, Sigmund. (1910a [1909]). Five lectures on psychoanalysis. SE, 11: 7-55.

CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER MASSACHUSETTS  September 1909 

https://ia902907.us.archive.org/17/items/SigmundFreud/Sigmund%20Freud%20%5B1909%5D%20Five%20Lectures%20on%20Psych-Aanalysis%20(James%20Strachey%20translation,%201955).pdf

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader: The Yellow Wallpaper, and Other Fiction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

PDF: https://www.scribbr.com/mla/pdf-citation/

                                             Summary and Response Reflection

     This was my first time writing a summary and response essay and it was a pleasant experience. I learned how to cite properly, how to integrate quotes into a sentence, and the complexity of genre. More importantly, I was genuinely intrigued by Freud’s lectures on psychoanalysis. When someone reads my essay, I hope they’re educated on how doctors had different approaches to treating patients. I engaged with Freud’s first lecture and was fascinated by psychoanalysis; I hope my paper gives some insight into the lecture. Anyone reading my paper will comprehend the two different approaches to treating an illness, one from Dr. Breuer and one from John.

      My essay on Freud’s attitude towards doctors has an exegetic genre. I explained Freud’s criticism of doctors and how his view was reflected in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The readers can understand Freud’s belief of the doctors improperly handling patients. Freud wanted doctors to take mental health seriously, and Dr. Breuer was one of them. This essay is for the readers to soak in information about Freud’s thoughts. You get to learn that doctors had no sympathy for patients that didn’t have a physical sickness. I strived to emphasize how important Freud thought mental health was. Furthermore, the tone set in my paper was formal, it was thorough and direct. I try to help the readers understand Freud’s disapproval of how doctors approached patients back then. I used citations from Freud’s first lecture and “The Yellow Wallpaper” so readers are motivated to read these stories and understand the connection between these two. They can understand the importance of mental health.

    The audience I would prefer overall is anyone who would like to be informed on how doctors treated patients. I want the readers to engage and be like “ Oh so Freud does have a point about these doctors”.  Additionally, I believe I answered the prompt thoroughly, and that the readers can grasp Freud’s attitude towards doctors back then. I didn’t mention exactly where all of this was taking place but I did mention how it was in the past tense back when doctors had no idea how important mental health was. Doctors now take all patients seriously because it is their duty and they don’t neglect patients because there is no physical problem so you can basically get a gist of how long ago this took place. Overall, I had a lot of drafts because it was hard not summarizing when the prompt asks you to inform the readers. Also making sure it was concise and not too repetitive over and over again was a good process because that’s a good habit to get used to. Understanding a rhetorical situation was helpful because it help set the tone for my essay. One thing I do need to improve on is synthesizing but I believe as I progress and write more essays, it will become easier.