Sonny's Blues: A Musical Comparison

Responding to the third topic, here we will examine the song “White Flash” by David Wirsig, off of the 2013 album Sunken City.  This song has the potential to powerfully affect its listeners due to the striking similarities between the singer and the narrator of Sonny’s Blues, which is bolstered by the shifting tone of the music.  The first three minutes of the song describe an unnamed narrator reminiscing about his past and family to another unnamed person.  The topic of past familial bonds already bears similarities to the narrator of Sonny’s Blues, who spends much of the early story thinking about events that have long since come and gone.  Wirsig’s narrator even makes mention of “a golden child [and] a scarlet wife,” which relates him even more strongly to Sonny and his family.  Throughout these first minutes the music is somber but still somewhat lighthearted, reflecting the warm up Sonny goes through at the beginning of his song.  Baldwin’s narrator describes Sonny as he “stammered, started one way, got scared…panicked again, got stuck” (20), which mirrors the slow, hesitant way Wirsig takes to the opening minutes of his song.  These characters take their time to introduce themselves to their instruments, then move on to the real heart of the performance.  In that heart, Wirsig’s singer and Baldwin’s narrator become even more deeply intertwined, and the audience is drawn in even further.

In the last three minutes of Wirsig’s song, the singer continues to relate himself to Baldwin’s narrator in ways that greatly affect readers’ emotions.  The most powerful link between the narrator’s situation and “White Flash” comes in the final verse.  Here the somber yet almost paradoxically bright tone of Wirsig’s song is dropped entirely, and the audience is left with a building swell of drums, the beginning of a musical realization as the singer builds up to a great understanding of the person he’s addressing in the song.  The guitar strings are plucked in an almost awed tone as the singer brings himself face to face with that person.  He enters the present tense, releasing the hold on the past he’s retained throughout the first half of the song in order to confront the second person and fully reconcile himself with their situation (which appears to be some form of impending death, be it metaphorical or literal, caused by “the white flash”).  He is beginning to reach some kind of realization.  This situation is strikingly similar to the way the narrator of Sonny’s Blues is able to remove himself from the past in the final pages of the story and see his brother for the man he’s become rather than dwelling on who he used to be.  Elements of the past still run through these last few passages, with the narrator remembering his mother and daughter, however the final moments are still grounded in the present and readers are given the impression that the narrator has reached a realization that will allow himself to live in the present with his brother.  Sonny and the narrator acknowledge each other for the people they’ve become with a new kind of understanding, which is shown by the narrator sending Sonny a drink and receiving a stoic nod in return, just as the singer seems to recognize the person he’s addressing in a new light as well.  The singer declares, “Your soul exposed in a moment brief, your fears and your hopes and your memories, the one I was always meant to see.”  He has come to terms with the person he’s addressing, seeing them for the first time in the present and accepting them for who they are now instead of the person he saw them as in the past.  This mirrors the narrator’s realization in Sonny’s Blues, where he hears Sonny playing and reflects, “I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free.”  Baldwin’s narrator, like Wirsig’s singer, has come to see the subject of his tale in a new light.  Because Wirsig’s song has such powerful parallels to Sonny’s story, it has the potential to affect the audience in a similar way to Sonny’s jazz song.  It mirrors everything, from the narrator’s refusal to see Sonny for the man he’s become to the ultimate acceptance of his brother and his situation.  For this, “White Flash” is a fair representation of Sonny’s song.