Ellie Parker
Professor Jerry-Cline Bailey
English 124
13 February 2015
The Development of Sympathy Through Time and Chronology
Time is a powerful device within literature. Authors can change the pace of time or move forward and backwards within time to enhance and empower their work. James Baldwin and Ambrose Bierce, within their stories “Sonny’s Blues” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, fully embrace their capability to control time. They control time by switching between the present and the past. This allows the readers to see the details of the “past character” and to fully understand the motivation and action behind the “present character”. This development of character through use of time helps both authors to create a sense of sympathy for the main characters who are being punished for actions they chose to embrace. Both Baldwin and Bierce use scrambled chronology to extract a feeling of sympathy from the reader, but Baldwin emphasizes the past to extract sympathy, while Bierce emphasizes the present to extract sympathy. In “Sonny’s Blue”, Baldwin uses scrambled chronology with emphasis on the past to extract a feeling of sympathy from his readers. The narrator, the brother of Sonny, tells the story starting in the present. In the present, he is on the subway when he read that his brother Sonny is in jail for issues with drugs. Distraught, the narrator begins to tell the story of how Sonny got to the present situation by looking at the past and telling the story from the past till he proceeds further than the present where the story begins. Through the narrator’s reflection and flashbacks of the past, Baldwin reveals Sonny’s good nature, uncontrollable environment, lack of parenting, and experience of disapproval. He highlights Sonny’s lack of control to take the blame off of Sonny, creating a sense of sympathy within the readers. This revelation of Sonny’s past allows the readers to blame Sonny’s bad choices on his upbringing. After the narrator finds out his brother has been caught, Baldwin switches time and the narrator reminisces on the past: “When he was about as old as these boys in my classes his face had been bright and open, there was a lot of copper in it and he’d had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy” (Baldwin 40). This quick thought of the past allows Baldwin to develop the character of Sonny. Through this flashback, Baldwin shows that Sonny used to be of innocent nature and had a bright future. In this moment, Baldwin uses a the past to allow the readers to see who Sonny’s really is. This drastic change from the present, where Sonny is in trouble with the law, to the past, where Sonny is innocent, is the moment when Baldwin creates a sense of sympathy for the boy who had gone astray. Baldwin continues to extract the feeling of sympathy for Sonny as he switches between the present and the past. After a long time apart, Sonny and narrator meet again in “present time”. Sonny meets with his brother in New York after he has been let out of jail. From here, he goes back to his brother’s house to visit. On the way back, the narrator has a flashback to the days they lived together in Harlem: “But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t” (Baldwin 45). This flashback fully stresses the lack of control the boys had over the environment they lived in. It makes clear the disaster that takes place in Harlem and the lack of capability to get out of Harlem. Sonny was trapped in a place where there was disaster and this environment was part of the reason he became a disaster. Again this point instills sympathy for Sonny. The narrator has more thoughts of the past that describe the series of unfortunate events within the brothers’ lives. The
