Suhaila Islam
Professor Von Uhl
FIQWS HA9
12/12/2021
Reflecting upon: How a Racist Society Pushes Sonny back in Life
This essay was written with the purpose to inform and educate people on how hard it is living as a black person in a racist America. The essay also portrays the message of how society is built against black people through the usage of James Baldwin’s critique on societal values, and the Freudian concepts of artistic gift and identification. Society pushing forward racist thoughts and discriminating against black individuals because of their skin color which later forces Sonny in “Sonny’s Blues” to turn to coping mechanisms such as drugs is the exigence in the paper. The paper is a non-fiction informative essay that incorporates two scholarly articles that serve as outside sources, the short story “Sonny’s Blues” which is a literary fiction piece, and Sigmund Freud’s “Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis”. The tone throughout my essay remains formal, seeing as it is an academic assignment the arguments are both respectful and direct.
James Baldwin critiques that Sonny, unfortunately, grew up in a racist society and had to use his artistic gift and heroin addiction to escape his dark reality. The essay showcases the context of racism and discrimination that is shamelessly present in Harlem, New York City during the late 1950s. The main audience of my paper are my college English Professors, Elisabeth Von Uhl, and Alyssa Yankwitt who will grade the essay as one of the last larger pieces of writing this semester. My classmates who peer-reviewed my paper, and the writing center tutors are also the audience in regards to my critical research analysis paper. They all helped me brainstorm and structure my paper effectively so that my message would come across as clear and coherent as opposed to vague and misunderstood.
The Critical Research Analysis paper in particular helped me finally comprehend the course learning outcomes because I stepped out of my comfort zone and learned from mistakes in previous essays. The drafting process of the paper improved compared to other writing pieces I was responsible for seeing as I not only started early but also sought advice and help from the resources around me to further develop rhetoric sensibility in my writing. The essay forced me to use my online databases such as the CCNY library since two scholarly articles were required to be incorporated in our papers. Overall after going through the stages of writing the Critical Research Analysis paper I feel as though I became a stronger writer who synthesized and analyzed instead of summarizing. Not only do I feel comfortable recognizing the rhetorical situation in different pieces of writing, but I also now know how to develop my use of sources and rhetoric.
Works Cited Page
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” Partisan Review, 1957. file:///C:/Users/suhai/Downloads/sonnysbluestext%20(6).pdf
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. W. W. Norton & Company, 1910. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b446/cfb00094a2e62f82e8c8e430581891ca4e47.pdf?_ga=2.153662776.1893964575.1597526595-1709737971.1597526595
Kowalska, Eva. “Troubled Reading: ‘Sonny’s Blues’ and Empathy.” Literator, vol. 36, no. 1, AOSIS, 2015, pp. e1–e6, https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v36i1.1148.
Schlosser, Joel Alden. “Socrates in a Different Key: James Baldwin and Race in America.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 3, Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 487–99, https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912912451352.
