Sonny Boy

“Sonny Boy” functions in the novel as a sentimental song whose emotional force gathers strangers into a shared performance of grief. Sung by a hired male quartet in close harmony, it accompanies mourning, tears, alcohol, and disorder; later, its remembered sound becomes the immediate explanation for Miss Myrtle’s renewed sobbing. The song therefore links public ceremony with private vulnerability, but also reveals how unstable and performative that sentiment can be.

Performance in the Main Room

In the main room, a male quartet hired from a vaudeville house sings “Sonny Boy” among a sequence of mother songs. Their close harmony gives the music a deliberately concentrated emotional texture, and the response is immediate: the older women weep generally while waiters carry them cups of punch. The women sit holding the cups in their fat, ringed hands as they cry, so the song’s tenderness is inseparable from the room’s material spectacle of jewelry, drink, hired entertainment, and public display.

The song is heard during a funeral-like disturbance surrounding a shrouded crap table and a coffin. While the orchestra plays and the quartet performs, the woman in red demands that the game be reopened and attacks the floral decorations; the resulting fight drives men into the main room, sends the orchestra climbing onto chairs with their instruments, and overturns the coffin. The corpse falls out and comes to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. Against this grotesque collision of mourning and violence, “Sonny Boy” becomes more than background music: it supplies an apparently innocent sentimental register that the surrounding bodies, money, alcohol, and aggression repeatedly violate.

Miss Myrtle’s Recollection

The song returns through Miss Myrtle’s emotional reaction. On an unusually warm June day, she begins to crinkle with tears, puts down her tankard, and fumbles for her handkerchief. She explains that the feeling simply comes over her, especially with them singing “Sonny Boy,” and says that he looked sweet. Her grief is therefore triggered not only by the dead person but by the song’s maternal sentiment and the scene of singing itself.

Miss Myrtle describes herself as having too tender a heart, then reaches for her beer. The juxtaposition is important: the song draws out an emotion she experiences as involuntary and bodily, but the available response is another drink. When she finds the tankard, she looks up and addresses Uncle Bud, recalling that she had once been mortified and ashamed to be seen on the street with a drunk boy like him. The song thus releases tenderness while the surrounding conversation exposes the social embarrassment, drinking, and fractured attachments that sentimental music cannot resolve.

Repetition and Emotional Ambivalence

“Sonny Boy” is repeated rather than used once as a simple marker of sadness. Its first appearance produces collective tears among older women; its second appearance is recalled by Miss Myrtle as the sound that makes her grief return. This repetition gives the song a recurrent emotional function: it converts an external performance into an inward response, then turns that response back into spoken testimony.

Yet the song’s effect remains ambivalent. It appears in a room where mourning is mixed with spectacle and where the coffin becomes the center of a brawl. It moves Miss Myrtle toward tenderness, but the tenderness is expressed through snuffling, handkerchief, beer, and confused address. The music creates a temporary community of feeling without producing stable understanding. It can make the women cry together, but it cannot prevent the room from erupting into violence or prevent memory from sliding into shame and drunkenness.

Narrative Significance

The song’s significance lies in its role as an acoustic thread between communal ritual and individual memory. Its close harmony gathers the room into a single emotional surface, while Miss Myrtle’s later reaction breaks that surface into a personal, unstable recollection. The contrast places sentiment beside the grotesque: maternal song beside the shrouded crap table, weeping beside punch and beer, floral offerings beside combat, and tenderness beside the exposed corpse.

The song also helps establish the instability of emotional interpretation in this world. A character may cry because the music evokes sweetness, because the dead person appears gentle, because alcohol lowers resistance, or because several impressions have fused together. “Sonny Boy” does not identify one pure cause. Instead, its recurrence shows how public sound, bodily distress, memory, and social performance become entangled, making grief both genuine and theatrically visible.