Remember, a text analysis essay is one in which you address how a text deals with a specific issue. Each of the prompts below focuses on a particular issue in “Sonny’s Blues.” Make sure that in the introduction to your essay you discuss directly the topic of the prompt you chose and that you respond to its main question or concern with a direct sentence or two by the end of your introduction. That sentence or two will be the thesis statement which you will develop in your body paragraphs. Do not discuss any part of the story that is irrelevant to your chosen prompt. This is a text analysis, not a story summary.
1. At the beginning of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator admits that he learned about his own brother’s arrest when he “read about it in the paper” (1). This would indicate that at that point in the story the narrator and his brother Sonny had not been communicating. According to what you learn from the story about the history of the relationship between the brothers, what were the personal differences between the two that made them drift apart before Sonny’s arrest
