In "Sonny's Blues," what are the differences between Sonny's personality and his elder brother's? James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" Explain in...

There are those who have read James Baldwin's powerful
story who have also felt the musicality of the words and the arrangement of time.  And,
just as there is both the intellectual and the sensual perception of this one narrative,
so, too, are the narrator and his brother two parts of a whole.  In a manner of
speaking, then, Sonny is the darker side of the
narrator.

For, it is the sensual personality, suffering in
his private world, seeking escape in heroin, meaning in music that is Sonny; while it is
the intellectual personality, the Algebra teacher, fighting logically against his Harlem
neighborhood by living in a better building, by being educated, by attempting to dwell
in the cerebral areas that is the narrator.  With the age and personality difference
between them, little communication and understanding is
effected.

Not until his daughter Gracie dies does the
narrator begin to realize that he and Sonny share anything:  "My trouble made his
real."  After having been in drug rehabilitation, the narrator talks with Sonny, now
living with him, who tells him what he has realized as he has just listened to a street
singer,

"...it
struck me all of a sudden how much suffering she must have had to go through--to sing
like that. It's repulsive to think you have to suffer that
much."

I said:  "But there's no way not to suffer--is
there, Sonny?"

At this point,
the narrator realizes that Sonny has needed "human speech to help him."  As they talk,
however, Sonny points out their difference:  the narrator is "hung up" on the way some
people try to deal with their suffering.  The narrator explains that he does not want
Sonny to die from heroin or drugs in his attempt not to suffer. Touched, Sonny tries to
explain that there is a "storm inside" that he tries to play, but he realizes sometimes
that "nobody's listening."  Nevertheless, knowing that his brother
is now listening Sonny bares his soul to him, confessing that even though he ran from
the drugs in Harlem, he was "at the bottom of something" on heroin.  "I had to try to
tell you," he says.

The narrator listens, he thinks about
what Sonny has said.  Whereas his intellectualism and emotional distance has kept him
from understanding Sonny, now he begins to feel what is in the heart of his brother,
having suffered himself from the loss of his daughter.  In the nightclub as the narrator
listens, hearing the evocations of the music; he begins to
understand,

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But the man who creates the music is hearing
something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it
as it hits the air.  What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible
because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.  And his triumph,
when he triumphs, is ours.

As
Sonny fills the piano with his own "breath of life," the narrator recognizes that Sonny
becomes part of the "family" of musicians playing.  And he is the listener, the other
side:

Freedom
lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would
listen, that he would never be free until we
did.

Both Sonny and his
brother, the narrator, suffer from the blues.  But it is for Sonny to tell of this
suffering, for he feels it so poignantly; and, it is for the narrator to listen to the
darker side of his being so that he can share in his brother's burden and give meaning
to both their sufferings, emotional and intellectual.