There's an old worn-out saying that when a door closes, there will always be a window to crawl through. But what if the window has bars? Or what if it's too high for anyone to reach without anyone giving it a push, and there doesn't seem to be anyone around? What if there were more around, but they were all scrambling to get out and not all of them made it through the opening? This analogy is reminiscent of what black people were going through in 1957, the year James Baldwin wrote “Sonny's Blues.” Windows appear as a motif throughout the tale, appearing in almost every scene. The windows, even if they shed light on reality, offer a glimpse into the unattainable; both of these functions drain hope from the underprivileged people of Harlem. There is an exception, however, in the character of Sonny himself, who creates his own hope - his own light - even in the darkness. The windows in “Sonny’s Blues” let in light, which helps illuminate different realities for the characters in the story. Interestingly, this enlightenment begins with darkness. At one point the narrator recalls the Sunday evenings of his childhood, when church guests gathered in the living room with his parents. The “darkness growing against the windowpanes” (May 82) reminds the children, including the young narrator, that their world is one of impending darkness. The darkness of the night envelops them just like the darkness of their skin and the darkness of their neighborhood; He constantly threatens them, banging on the window like a tree branch on a stormy night. As the narrator grows up, however, he is quite accustomed to the darkness of his life, and the dark windows take on a new meaning: denial. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The story opens in a subway, where windows are rendered unusable in the tunnels, as the narrator reads the newspaper and learns of his brother's arrest for heroin. Denial is actually a comforting possibility in the dark underground, and it takes the narrator some time to believe the news. The narrator avoided the truth for a while before the story began, pushing it into the darkness where he didn't need to look at it. He had “kept it out… for a long time.” (May 74) For people privileged enough to live outside of Harlem, looking through a window might be a pleasant experience. But for Harlem residents, it's just a reminder of the violent, squalid neighborhoods they were born into. The people in the story escape their disadvantaged realities by ignoring the windows, turning instead to entertainment as a distraction. As Baldwin says, “the darkness of the films… blinded them to that other darkness” (May 75). In the apartment complex where the narrator lives, there are huge windows in the houses. But no one “cares” about them, opting instead to “watch the TV screen” (May 80). Television and cinema show something different from reality, a welcome break from the gloomy outside landscape. The illuminating power of windows in “Sonny's Blues” is shown no better than in the scene where the narrator remembers speaking to his mother for the last time. In the scene he discovers many shocking things: his father had a brother who was killed, his father often cried to his mother behind closed doors, etc. He learns all this from his mother, who sits at the window, the light shining on her black dress, a spotlight on the darkness that the narrator didn't even know existed. “This was the first time,” he said, “that I saw my mother look old” (May 83). At the same time as the narrator comesenlightened about his father, his mother stares at the streets, dreamily, humming a church song, as if searching for something more. The mother isn't the only one looking through windows to find something unattainable. When Sonny returns to New York, he and the narrator take a cab to their neighborhood. Sonny asks to go through the park so he can see the city he hasn't seen in a while. As they both look through the windows, the narrator realizes that in order to "escape the trap" of Harlem as he has—he had found a respectable job as an algebra teacher—he must lose something of himself. No one comes out whole and complete. He realizes that he and Sonny are looking out the windows at “the part of [their] selves that had been left behind” (May 80). Another touching scene where the narrator searches for something impossible to grasp through a window is when he observes a revival meeting. They begin to sing “It's Zion's old ship… saved many thousands” (May 92). But, as the narrator points out, none of the people listening to the hymn were saved. It still has an effect on people. Sonny compares the woman's singing voice to a drug (May 93). The view from certain windows could sometimes be like a drug. Another time in the story a window is compared to a lodestone (May 96), which is a magnetic rock. Even though the people in the story know that things are probably impossible, they can't stay away from those thoughts. At this point it should be noted that windows are not the only interior element that represents the unattainable in this story. On the very first page Baldwin proposes the idea of ​​rooms as barriers. The opportunities of Harlem children are hindered by the “low ceiling of their actual possibilities” (May 74). So while they're trapped in cramped, low-ceilinged rooms, all they have is a window to look out of to see what they're missing. What's interesting is that windows are mentioned almost everywhere in the story except in the scenes where Sonny plays the piano. Sonny's name is no coincidence. It is a homophone for “sunny.” There is something sunny about his personality; it seems that with his passion for the piano he is the only one doing what he wants in life (even though his brother is the one with an admirable career). Sonny created his own sun with music, and when he plays the piano he doesn't need the light from the outside world. One could argue that Sonny is as desperate to crawl through those metaphorical windows as anyone else in the story. After all, he writes in his letter that he “feels like a man who has tried to climb up some deep, very deep and strange hole and has just seen the sun up there outside. I have to go out” (May 78). But it's important to remember that he was arrested at the time and will no longer be able to be part of the jazz scene until he returns from rehab. He only wants an open window when he doesn't have access to his piano. After all, the only time a window is opened in the story, it is opened by Sonny, and he immediately closes it again; let in the stench of garbage cans (May 88). While he might have had the opportunity to open a metaphorical window to a better life - he was smart, after all - Sonny is content to find happiness in a darker world of drugs, nightclubs and jazz. Unlike his brother, Sonny is aphotic and thrives despite the darkness rather than trying to slip through a crack into the light. The narrator experiences this beauty in the darkness that Sonny has found for a brief moment when he listens to Sonny play at the nightclub. He thinks for a moment that maybe he can “stop complaining,” but then remembers that.