Introduction

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” distinguish different forms of societal influence. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” demonstrates Connie’s (protagonist) innocent arrogance towards her surroundings. However, Baldwin maintains a narrator whose interest and judgment remain shadowed by ignorance. The contrast between both novellas lies in Connie’s arrogance and John’s ignorance. Both these short stories are thematically similar in that Baldwin and Oates reinforce the lack of communication between family members.

Baldwin writes “Sonny’s Blues” in fragmentized collages of misery and experience moulded into Sonny and the narrator’s perspective of him. In contrast, Oates’ clouded judgment description reflects the narrator’s tone and effect on Connie. The narration style in these short stories evokes deliberately created perspectives. Also, Baldwin and Oates maintain the compelling notion that these protagonists are symbols and irrevocably signify those easily inflicted by societal threats. Baldwin and Oates use narration to represent societal temptation by introducing complex elaborative diction versus straightforward constraint language. In the context of these short stories, vices represent a grave moral failure. Sins often reflect a planned restriction, and the structure of these stories evokes that restriction. Restraint does not imply withholding of form and reducing the system to reflect a particular meaning, but rather the result of how the narrators feel; therefore, becoming the vice (consider, for example, how in “Sonny’s Blues” Baldwin turned music into the narrator’s vice—a different medium of expression unfamiliar to the narrator). The final summary in these two short stories is the same in such a way that the threat becomes the lack of communication and is prevalent throughout both stories as a central theme. Due to the variety of possible analyses regarding the similarities between these two short stories, the overall underlying articles at work concern the characterizations of societal temptations, vices, and threats concerning narration, structure, and music, respectively describing why Baldwin’s narrator and Oates’s June were successful in overcoming social menace while Sonny and Connie were placed put under submission by social threat.

Societal Threat

In both stories, narration is critical in describing the societal threat. Baldwin uses narration differently from Oates in that his approach is a more personal depiction of social menace, whereas Oates illustrates a detached narrative perspective. In “Sonny’s Blues,” John is a self-absorbed individual. For instance, long before the narrator introduces who Sonny is, the narrator expresses himself in the subjective form countless times. Baldwin creates an engaging narrator when he states, “I couldn’t believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn’t find any room for it anywhere inside of me”(Baldwin 92). Baldwin creates a confused and uncertain narrator, contributing to Baldwin’s narrative strategy (the reader is not quite sure what to make of the narrator). Unlike Oates’s narrator, the tone is more straightforward. For example, the detached narrator says, “and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house—it was a summer vacation” (Oates 38). In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the narrator draws attention to exact precision. This exactness reflects Connie’s attitude, as she is only fifteen years old and ignorant of her circumstances. However, narration-wise, “Sonny’s Blues” provides a narrator whose insight is elaborative and non-restrictive entirely out of ignorance, yet that ignorance is foreshadowed in Sonny.

Consequently, the narrator states carelessly, “I was trying to remember everything I’d heard about dope addiction, and I couldn’t help watching Sonny for signs” (Baldwin 97). Consequently, because of his ignorance of Sonny, readers are left with a dramatic monologue-like representation of the character as an absorbed, controlling individual. For instance, Baldwin’s narrator says, “I simply couldn’t see why he’d want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowning around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor” (Baldwin 101). On the other hand, Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is given detached narrative sympathy—”Connie liked the way he was dressed, which was the way all of them dressed” (Oates 42). Due to the subject matter of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates justifies Connie’s actions in a detached narrative tone to emphasize Connie’s simplicity. Baldwinin “Sonny’s Blues,” uses elaborative syntax to develop John’s confused mental state.

Baldwin and Oates consider narrative syntax, structure, and vices as probable symbolic assertions in these two short stories. An author’s decision to create distinct stylistic narrative prose adversely affects a story’s structure. For instance, Baldwin makes “Sonny’s Blues” a structural mimic of Sonny. Baldwin creates a narrator who cannot perceive Sonny adequately and makes an ill-informed narrator. Hence, the structure becomes a vice for the narrator because of his reluctance to integrate shape into the system. Blues music in “Sonny’s Blues” is symbolic because of its background relating to casual undertones of the vernacular language and its attempt to inform communities tainted by mishaps. Blues pieces are non-coordinated and lack a defined format. This deliberate structure remains a vice for the narrator. The narrator’s lifestyle as an ordered individual fails to realize that Sonny does not conform to the order. Because the system depicts variables that are incalculable by math, the narrator lacks a thorough understanding of Sonny. For example, when the narrator writes a letter to Sonny, the narrator says with very factual pretences, “Here’s what he said” (95), whereas, in the letter, Sonny writes with an emotionally undefined vernacular structure: You do not know how much I need to hear from you.

I wanted to write to you many times, but I was afraid of how much I hurt you, so I did not write. However, now I feel like a man trying to climb out of some deep, funky hole. I just saw the sun outside. I got to leave. (Baldwin 95) The resultant factor is the meaning gained from these structural formalities Baldwin constructed to reflect the narrator’s lack of understanding and ill-informed interpretation of his brother Sonny. As opposed to the stiff structure of the short story, Oates establishes a different character in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. For instance, the form of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is precisely organized, including the narrative perspective. Oates deliberately created a narrator who stated the facts of Connie’s situation without excess elaboration to reinforce a fixed structure in a sporadic mind. Consider when the narration begins directly and straightforwardly with, “Her name was Connie” (Oates 34), explicitly intending an ordered, thorough introduction.

In contrast, Connie’s vernacular attraction to Arnold Friend evokes her age, “‘Don’tcha wanna see what’s in the car? Don’tcha wanta go for a ride?” (Oates 42). For Connie, the structure becomes a vice, and she is entrapped because of the third-person limited omniscient narrative strategy employed by Oates rather than a first-person subjective narration, hence reducing sympathy and stating the blatant facts as if recounting a case on a log. These structural vices become a deliberate tool Baldwin and Oates use simultaneously to reflect narrative and character traits. Baldwin’s narrator and Oates’s June did not follow the structures of their respective short stories, unlike Sonny and Connie, so they overcame social menace.

Communication breakdown

Thematically, both stories share the ideal communication problem. Naturally, this is reflected in Oates’ straightforward prose, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” for example, readers know that “Everything about [Connie] had two sides to it” (Oates 36) and “Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” (Oates 35). Oates already reveals Connie’s fragility. The narrator in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” states, “If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving, and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving” (Oates 38) that creates the atmosphere of rejection and alienation which is sociologically a perfect standpoint that could potentially develop vulnerability. This vulnerability is emphasized throughout the story with depictions of Connie looking into Arnold Friend’s eyes: “He grinned so broadly his eyes became slit and she saw how to think the lashes were thick and black as if painted with black tarlike material” (Oates 45). Arnold in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” symbolizes social menace. His seduction and overcoming of Connie’s innocent fragility contribute significantly to her failure to overcome the embodiment of social risk—Arnold Friend.

The narrator shows different depictions of social menace when he says about Arnold’s friend, “His sunglasses told nothing about what he was thinking” (Oates 45)—Oates depicts social risk as cowering behind Arnold’s glasses and that social menace can strike at any time. Communication occurs best when there is some established bond; in both stories, that foundation is lacking in both families. In “Sonny’s Blues,” the foundation for communication to be built up is also lacking. The narrative form evokes this lack of communication. The narrator in “Sonny’s Blues” uses sharp diction to reinforce his lack of communication with his imprecise vernacular brother Sonny. Considering the approach the narrator takes when talking to Sonny, there seem to be times when the narrator is reluctant to speak to him and seeks a third party to get insight from him: “I read about it in the paper” (Baldwin 91) and “I read about Sonny’s trouble in the spring” (Baldwin 105). The crater separating Sonny and the narrator is so large that he cannot simply approach Sonny with the questions he wishes to ask. Darkness is a recurring theme throughout “Sonny’s Blues.” Strategically, Baldwin creates a neighbourhood ridiculed with dark valleys and aisles, similar to the analogy Oates used to convey Arnold’s social menace: “So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood” (Baldwin 96).

Similarly, music appears throughout these stories as a medium of escape. Oates’s Connie listens to Bobby King, a jazz melodist, whereas Baldwin’s Sonny beautifies the blues tradition’s improvisation. Music and the gripping blackness of social menace are repeated motifs throughout these two short stories. They explain why June and the narrator of “Sonny’s Blues” have overcome the societal threat. In contrast, Sonny and Connie have fallen victim to a social menace because of neglect and alienation.

Conclusion

A thorough analysis of Baldwin’s and Oates’s short stories reveals social temptations, vices and threats comparatively with narration, structure and themes, respectively, explaining why June and Baldwin’s narrator triumphed over social menace while Sonny and Connie consumed. The narrative style contributed significantly to accurately depicting social temptations in that Baldwin used a precise narrator who lacked emotion. In contrast, Sonny engaged in emotional discourse from Sonny’s perspective. Similarly, Oates utilizes an inadequately intellectually developed teenager with a harsh, unsympathetic narrative style to further emphasize the nature of the subject. Baldwin utilizes disorder and non-chronological depictions of Sonny’s lifetime in a theatrical blues representation, adversely affecting the narrator’s perception of Sonny. Oates’s structural use of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” depicts a fixed, unchanging, chronologically ordered story for an individual lacking a sense of order, Connie, a fourteen-year-old girl.

Similarly, Baldwin and Oates establish an incomprehensible vice that is incomprehensible to Baldwin’s narrator and Oates’s Connie. As a summary of structural and narrative styles, threats and their relation to the theme tie closely together in these two short stories. The danger for Sonny and Connie is neglect. The result is alienation from the family, which preludes to a lack of communication—all viable themes in both stories. The young male and female protagonists fall victim to societal threats because of their driven alienation from their families and their closest friends and relatives, which develops a sense of vulnerability. Social menace occurs when one is gravely vulnerable, which Baldwin and Oates spectacularly depict.