Comparing Sonnys Blues And The Horse Dealer's Blues By James Baldwin

The lives of Sonny and Mabel are completely different, they were raised in completely different ways and in completely different places. “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin is about the life of a young man who is struggling with drug addiction; he has faced many challenges in his life. One of the many challenges he faces is what connects him to the main character of “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”; both Mabel and Sonny experienced losing both their mother and their father while they were still fairly young. “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence is based on a young woman struggling to deal with the loss of her mother and father, she desires the love and affection of a man. Mabel’s mental state differs from Sonny’s who is very angry with the life he was given. “Sonny’s Blue” and “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” have similar conflicts, but have different themes and are told

Sonny and Mabel, two of the main characters in “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” are surprisingly very similar, especially when it comes to the conflicts they face during their lives. In “Sonny’s Blues” the narrator and Sonny deal with the death of both their mother and their father, they lost their mother at a young age, in the story the narrator talks about when he and Sonny first lost their mother and the conversation they had the first time they were alone following her death (Baldwin 51). Sonny struggled with many things in his life but the source of a lot of his pain may have been due to the loss of his mother at a young age. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” it states, “ And she lived in the memory of her mother, who had died when she was fourteen, and whom she had loved”(Lawrence 458). Both Sonny and Mabel struggled with the loss of their mothers. In the “Horse Dealer’s Daughter”