How Does Christopher Boone Change In The Curious Incident

In the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, the protagonist, Christopher Boone is a fifteen-year-old boy who lives in a small town called Swindon, England with his father. He is mathematically and logically gifted but struggles to interact with people. He can only express himself in a simple and straightforward way and cannot understand any kind of social cue, like facial expressions, metaphors, and jokes. As he discovers the death of his neighbor’s dog and learns his mother is still alive, he experiences a series of challenges that he could never have imagined. In order to grow up, Christopher needs to learn how to interact with people more effectively. While he learns to function as a normal person, he never completely changes.

Christopher explains that he has difficulty figuring out people’s emotions from their facial expressions. He can easily recognize sad and happy faces, but when his therapist, Siobhan, draws some pictures of other emotions, he finds the faces are confusing and is “unable to say what these meant” (3). So he has to memorize the exact meaning of each face and quickly determine what face others are making when they talk to him. When his father lies to him about his mother’s death, he tries to figure out what he means how and his father feels: “I can't tell what [people] are thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film''(22). If he cannot understand what someone is saying, He will just “walk away” (3). He is just escaping from his own problem, but not actually solving