The Narrator In Sonny's Blues By James Baldwin

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The story “Sonny’s Blues” written by James Baldwin is a narrative written with a first-person narrator. This written work would be drastically changed if it had a different narrator. The narrator could be different due to him being a different type of narrator, such as a third-person omniscient narrator; a narrator with different knowledge pertaining to the story; a narrator with different interests regarding the story; or a narrator who has a different purpose for telling the story. Everything that is tweaked or changed about the narrator of the story has a magnified effect on everything else in the story because the point of view is the medium through which we observe everything in the narration.
As previously mentioned, the narrator in …show more content…
The narrator has “personally witnessed” the events in the story (123). The narrator is unnamed but that does not effect anything in the piece. He reports on what he has “done, said, heard or thought” about his brother and his lives, what he has witnessed other characters saying and doing, any second-hand information people have told him, and any inferences, conclusions, or conjectures he formulated about the characters and events (123). The narrator is very similar to the author, but due to the fact he is a character in the story he has a completely separate identity from the author. Narrators reflect real people, and the speaker in “Sonny’s Blues” is no exception. Like people, when they are telling the story they can be reliable or unreliable. Sonny’s brother in “Sonny’s Blues” is reliable because he includes views and feelings of other characters. The speaker has all the knowledge of first-hand witness of living through the story. He is an educated individual who has become a teacher who also carries in-depth knowledge of his family's history and life in urban black neighborhoods such as Harlem where he resides. He personally knows the major characters in the story and this effects how he relays the information about them to the reader. He has a
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