| Abstrakt: |
James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy share much in common. Timothy Golden and Robert Reid have both situated the story within Nietzsche’s conceptualizations of the Dionysian and Apollonian. However, this paper fills in, revises, and challenges interpretations by Golden and Reid, emphasizing that the story is an explicit dramatization of The Birth of Tragedy, with direct references to Nietzsche’s ideas regarding the Dionysian ground of experience and the Apollonian impulse to represent that experience. At the end of the story, however, the narrative slips free from the Nietzschean schematization and suggests a transcendent other at work, an otherness that shines on Sonny’s blues and effects a release for the narrator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
