Characters
- Sonny is the main character's brother. The reader sees him through his brother’s eyes, as a quiet, introspective person with a tendency to withdraw inside himself. Sonny is also described by the narrator as wild, but not crazy. He has a heroin addiction, which led him to jail, but because of his passion for jazz, he became a musician.
- Sonny’s brother is the narrator and main character; his name is never mentioned throughout the story. He is a high school algebra teacher and family man. Unlike Sonny who is constantly struggling with his feelings, he chooses to ignore his own pain.
- Isabel is Sonny’s sister-in-law, she is open and talkative. After Sonny’s mother died, he lived with Isabel in her parents' house for a while, while his brother was in the army.
- Creole is a bass player who leads the band that Sonny plays in at the end of the story. He functions as a kind of father figure for Sonny.
- Sonny's Mother
- Sonny's Father
- Sonny's Uncle (His father's brother)
- Sonny's Friend
Read more about this topic: Sonny's Blues
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Children pay little attention to their parent’s teachings, but reproduce their characters faithfully.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is open to question whether the highly individualized characters we find in Shakespeare are perhaps not detrimental to the dramatic effect. The human being disappears to the same degree as the individual emerges.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)