41 pages • 1 hour read
Esi EdugyanHalf-Blood Blues
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
It’s no surprise that music plays a central role in a novel about jazz musicians. Indeed, music serves a variety of purposes, and multiple views about music are expressed. For Hiero, who only speaks German, music takes on extra importance as his primary way of communicating with English speakers, including Delilah and Armstrong. It also becomes a means for him to express his thoughts on the Nazi regime as he develops and begins to record “Half-Blood Blues,” a satirical, jazzy take on a prominent Nazi song. For others, like Sid and Chip, creating music may not have quite the same urgency, but it offers moments of catharsis and escape as the world darkens around them.
The type of music they produce also carries symbolic significance. Jazz is improvisatory by nature, while most other types of music follow a printed score (when Sid criticizes the Golden Seven, a Nazi-approved musical group, he mentions, with disgust, that they play from sheet music). This makes jazz a more accurate reflection of the uncertainty they live in, amid evolving political and personal situations. It also denotes a degree of freedom that is missing from more structured, classical forms, such as those preferred by Ernst’s father.
Yet Edugyan also hints that music is not the be-all, end-all that some take it to be. Armstrong counsels Sid not to prioritize music over everything else, and Hiero moves on from creating music to producing sculptures, though he still enjoys listening to music.
Names
Though most of the character names in the novel don’t seem to carry any special significance (with the possible exception of Hiero, whose name has an obvious homonym), the way that names are used and shared receives special attention. Most striking is Chip’s refusal to divulge his middle name. In what may be an act of gentle protest at his stubbornness, Delilah insists on calling him Charlie, much to his annoyance. Even Sid, his friend from childhood, doesn’t find out what the C in Charles C. Jones stands for until the issue is pressed by Louis Armstrong, Chip’s musical idol. It turns out that Chip is short for Chippewah, rather than a derivation of his first name. Armstrong, who encourages every to call him by his first name, gently chides Chip for keeping his middle name a secret from his friends for so long. The implication is that by withholding his name from them, he is also withholding a part of himself.
That possibility is reaffirmed when Sid and Hiero tell each other their middle names during a moment of quiet reflection in Hamburg. This moment marks a high point in their relationship, which later deteriorates as Sid’s jealousy of Hiero deepens. The worsening of their relationship is reflected in Sid’s substitution of other words and names for Hiero, from “scrawny Kraut bastard” to “Little Judas” (272). But at the end of the book, after making a full confession to Hiero, Sid ends by calling Hiero a different name at his request: Thomas, Hiero’s middle name, a fact shared with Sid so many years before. This suggests a change both in Hiero himself and in the way that Sid thinks of him. It looks forward, but it also looks back, linking them to the moment of greatest serenity in their complicated past.
Cats
Within the jazz idiom, it’s not uncommon for musicians to refer to themselves or each other as cats. Edugyan literalizes this representation in Half-Blood Blues with the inclusion of a cat whom the characters dub “Dame Delilah the Second.” The cat first appears while the band is hiding out in the Hound, and Chip jokingly names it after Delilah Brown after its wailing keeps him up at night. Delilah warms to the joke, and to the cat, even pronouncing the wiry creature to be a “warrior cat” (139). Much later, in Paris, she even thinks to ask Sid about Dame Delilah’s fate; Sid reveals that Hiero “tossed her back in the pit” that she came from (254). Delilah feels a degree of sympathy, if not identification, for the cat, which enjoys some brief attention in the Hound before being ejected back into the cruel world. Similarly, by the end of the novel, Delilah’s moment of fame has passed, and she returns to Canada, where she marries, only to die of cancer a couple of year later.
Apart from Dame Delilah, the comparison with cats is made on at least two other occasions. Armstrong refers to playing music together as “swinging with these cats” (236), and Delilah likens Hiero to a stray cat.
