Music Symbol Analysis

At various points throughout Another Brooklyn, August sees music—and specifically jazz—as an embodiment of the struggle to survive hardship and sorrow. At the beginning of the novel, she looks back on her life and wonders if she and her friends would have had an easier time coping with adversity if they’d known about jazz, which she believes would have helped them see that there was a “melody to [their] madness.” In this way, music represents the ever-present underlying joy and beauty in life, even amid messy or upsetting circumstances. This is a liberating notion, as it suggests that there will always be a way to find meaning and substance in life, even when it seems there’s nothing but tragedy in the world. In keeping with this, August starts listening to avant-garde jazz when she’s a young adult, finding great solace in the pain she hears expressed in the music—pain that has been channeled into something hauntingly beautiful. “How had my own father, so deep inside his grief, not known there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell his story?” she wonders while listening to jazz, making it clear that she sees music as evidence not only that other people have undergone the same kind of hardship as her and her loved ones, but also that it’s possible to derive meaning and value from these experiences. In turn, music comes to represent resilience.