Literary Analysis of “Sweat” and “Sonny’s Blues”
Amelia Williams
ENG125: Introduction to Literature
Instructor: Deborah Zeringue
December 22, 2014

As living and breathing human beings people are bound to experience some type of conflict. Conflict can be present within a person, between two people, between a person and forces of nature, and even between a person and their society. Conflict is defined as the struggle that shapes the plot in a story (Clugston, 2014, ch.4sect.1 para.4). When reading a piece of literature, especially a short story, one should pay special attention to the central conflict because it is the key element of the story (Clugston, 2014). This essay will analyze “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston in terms of individual versus individual, nature, society, and self, symbolism, figurative language, similarities and differences.
In the short stories “Sonny’s Blues” and “Sweat” both of the main characters deal with an internal conflict of some sort. Sonny in Sonny’s Blues has to refrain from turning back to drugs after his release from prison; he is also facing the piano again after not playing for a year. Delia, on the other hand has to live with an abusive, cheating husband that “done beat huh ‘nough tuh kill three women” (Hurston, 1926, para. 24). In both texts the main characters are described as humble people, for example in “Sweat,” the author writes “Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf” (Hurston, 1926, para. 10). The word meekness lets the reader know that Delia is slow to speak. In “Sonny’s Blues” the author writes “he had wonderfully direct brown eyes, and great gentleness and privacy” (Baldwin, 1957, para. 3) here, the word privacy lets the reader know that Sonny likes staying to himself. The writer of “Sonny’s Blues” also shows that the narrator is