The Big Short Story

"Sonny's Blues" has been one of my favorite stories in Going to Meet the Man  so far. I enjoyed watching the narrator and Sonny's relationship unfold. The whole story builds up to Sonny's performance at the nightclub with the narrator watching him play for the first time. This scene was very powerful, and especially touching in the context of the series of events leading up to it. The narrator has an almost strained relationship with Sonny. He does not agree with Sonny's lifestyle and aspirations to be a musician. When Sonny tells the narrator that he wants to be a musician, the narrator assumes Sonny means a concert pianist. The narrator has a pre-disposed view of jazz, wondering why his brother would "want to spend his time hanging around nightclubs, clowing around on bandstands, while people pushed each other around a dance floor" (Sonny's Blues, 121). To him, jazz is almost beneath Sonny in some way. The narrator's reaction to Sonny...

Ever since we found out that Walt in "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was the brother of Seymour Glass from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," I've been trying to find links between all the stories. My most promising theory is that Seymour Glass is Sergeant X in "For Esmé — with Love and Squalor." When I was reading "For Esmé," I couldn't help but draw similarities between the two, or at least what I envisioned Seymour to be like before the war.  At the beginning of "For Esmé," the narrator mentions his wife, "a breaktakingly levelheaded girl" and a mother-in-law who's "not getting any younger" (For Esmé 87). Seymour also has a wife, Muriel, and a mother-in-law. Something about the way Sergeant X mentions his mother-in-law reminds me of how Seymour's relationship with his mother-in-law would be like. Sergeant X says that he doesn't get to see his mother-in-law much, so he doesn't want to cancel h...