While reading Sonny’s Blues, the language of it struck me before anything else. The author uses rapid-fire literary devices piled on top of each other delicately, like stacking dominoes on top of each other, each one shifted a little bit like a staircase. A few times, a metaphor would build on another, and I’d have to go back to the first and reread the chain reaction to realize what the sentence was talking about.

The first really interesting one comes early on – in the second paragraph, “a great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting … sending trickles of ice water up and down my veins.” He uses metaphors and similes and figures of speech with the same regularity that other authors commonly use nouns, or adjectives.
Each one made me think. They say that the difference between an artists brain and someone who isn’t particularly creative’s is the unlikely connections that creative people make. While reading this, I kept seeing what I’d call and unlikely connection metaphor and realize that it makes perfect sense, but that it was not something I’d ever think of.

“… the baby brother I’d never known looked out from the depth of his private life, like an animal waiting to be coaxed into the light.” This simile, like many of the authors, is not just a throw-away; it follow through logically in its other implications; without spelling it out, it made me think of how his brother probably could have been his close confidante during childhood if his older brother had every tried patiently to “coax him” out of the “darkness” instead of fighting with him all of the time.

He also uses a device several times that Navakov frequently employed: ending a figurative sentence literally or semi-literally, and vice versa. (IE ‘She fell out of the chair and into love.’) “walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom.” “and when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness.” “the car kept on a-going and it ain’t stopped till this day.”

This story emotionally affected me on another level, because I have an older brother dealing (or .. not dealing) with addictions to both drugs and pills, and so many of these lines made my heart spasm, describing the urge to look through his brother’s room but not having the courage, and the fact that he suppressed details of his brother to keep himself from going crazy with grief, and Sonny talking about people doing more drugs “In order to keep them from shaking to pieces.” But I can’t talk about that. I would like to say that I was impressed with the theme and emotions dealt with in this story, besides the language, though.