Eucharistic symbols depicted in Sonny’s Blues
Soyeon Kim_HSS1F
Assignment 2 (Discovery Draft)
(Not a proper intro yet)
As the narrator mentions that he could feel “how much suffering she must have had to go thorough” while he listening to the woman sing (p.41), a music is a way of telling one’s suffering. Sonny also finds the freedom of expressing his pain thorough his music. The pain expressed in his music are the sacrificed self, a relationship with his family, and even his struggle with heroin. Through these sacrifices, he is described as an eucharistic figure who gives himself totally to the music that brings salvation.
The symbolic Christ-like self-sacrifice is well illustrated in his leaving his home in Harlem. Sonny is aware of the likely hatred and disappointment toward him that his leaving could bring to his family. Despite, he chooses to leave, as Jesus Christ chooses to leave to Jerusalem, even though he knows he will be suffered, as mentioned in “He did not want to go about in Judea because the…show more content… While Scotch symbolizes a destruction, milk symbolizes nurture. Sonny’s drinking a simultaneous mixture of two opposite components indicates that he chooses to continue embracing the suffering, while he also grows up by bearing it. Eventually, the term “cup of trembling” serves as an ultimate symbol of Christ’s self-sacrifice. This biblical reference came from “I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury (Isaiah 51)”, establishes a climax of his self-sacrifice. As if Christ pledges to aid people of Jerusalem, even though they had sinned, and drinks the cup of trembling, Sonny also digests all the fury and anger, and chooses to dedicate himself in music which he values the most. Thus his sinning and suffering, and redemption, ultimately sainted Sonny, as illustrated that the cup “glowed(p.48)” above Sonny’s head like a