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The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time By Mark Haddon

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Recommended: Effects of autism on the development of children

Autism, formally known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is a condition that impacts behavioral aspects including communication and social skills. These characteristics vary, and one individual may not display the same signs as another. While autism can permit several struggles daily, like difficulties forming relationships and expressing themselves, it can also provide a complex understanding of the world around them. They possess incredible abilities that no other can do. In the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon, young Christopher Boone is determined to solve the murder mystery of his neighbor’s dog. He thrives even with the downfalls of autism. He manages to navigate himself throughout the entire city …show more content…

After finding out that his mother left his father for another man, he reminisces on his memories of young Mrs. Boone. He discusses how his memory is most similar to a DVD player because he can skip from one image to another in one swift thought. Christopher lists, “We were on holiday in Cornwall and in the afternoon we were on the beach…Mother was wearing a pair of shorts made out of denim and a light blue bikini top and was smoking cigarettes..” (Haddon 77) Christopher can pick apart anything that has ever occurred in his life. He remembers the exact setting, date, and time. He can actively recall all of his senses in the moment including sight and smell. For any other person, it would be difficult for one to recognize all details of one event, especially from such an early age. A few weeks later, Mr. Boone confesses to murdering the dog, Wellington, and lying about Mrs.Boone’s sudden death. He decides that he couldn’t live with him anymore, so he departs to find his mother. Christopher tries to find the nearest train station. He explains, “If something is nearby you can find it by moving in a spiral, walking clockwise and taking every right turn until you come back to the road you’ve already walked on…and so on, like this..” (Haddon 139) Using his memory he can visualize a pathway of directions. Christopher can get himself to his next destination even if he’s lost. He draws a visual map of where he walked past in his …show more content…

On his journey to his mother, Christopher buys a ticket and boards his train to London. As he waits, he is burdened with tons of signs, all with various symbols, words, and fonts. He notes each phrase and admits that they became blurred and jumbled. He reports, “There were too many and my brain wasn’t working properly and this frightened me so I closed my eyes and counted slowly to 50…” (Haddon 170) Christopher’s senses have become overstimulated. When this happens, it becomes almost unfeasible to think and stand to be in the same room. He can read all of the information and it piles up all at once. For him, it feels like the signs are being thrown into his mind simultaneously. Consequently, he becomes engulfed in the large sounds of the train station. As he sits on a bench, Christopher eventually grows more stressed and anxious in a chaotic environment to his senses. He blurted, “…the roaring got louder and I groaned loudly but I couldn’t block it out..I thought the little station was going to collapse..” (Haddon 176) The sounds of the train moving only were heightened as he focused too much on them. The projection of sounds felt as if it were being blasted into his thoughts. These aspects of Christopher’s autism could affect what places he can and cannot tolerate. He would struggle with public areas that are inevitable to an unpredictable atmosphere at any given time. It would ultimately control his

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In conclusion, Christopher likes being by himself. Haddon makes us look through Christopher’s eyes in the book. We learn a lot about ourselves because of this. I realized that everyone is different and has a different point of view on everything. In the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time it says “‘Special needs!

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as if the trains were only in my mind. And normally I don't imagine things that aren't happening because it is a lie and it makes me feel scared, but it was better than watching the trains coming in and out of the station because that made me feel even more scared” (Haddon 179-180). This is connected to he base of my thematic statement by showing us how we can get through our fears if we just put our mind to it. Christopher also used logic later in another paragraph to think of a different salution to this whole situation that he put himself through leaving his dads house. The prime numbers that he talked about by liking them with his book he used some order to determine how the numbers went on as the book ended up getting longer and

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The book Into Thin Air by John Krauker really identifies how capitalism and the hunger for profit are taking over how leaders and citizens run communities. When you look around and see construction, cranes, and buildings being built, it is just another way that the city is trying to maximize their profits and growth. If you look around, there are hundreds of thousands of new houses being built every year in your area. What does this mean to the city? More profit because of the new residents moving in.

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Although Christopher does not mention autism by name anywhere in the novel, I believe that he recognizes the ways he differs from most people and he is aware of these differences. He says, for instance, that although most people enjoy chatting, he hates it because he finds it pointless. Christopher has trouble relating to others, and he really can't understand people's thoughts and feelings. It's hard for other people to have a normal conversation with him because they have to be careful of what they say.

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Raising a child like Christopher is very difficult. Christopher often disappears in the middle of the night to go out for walks and quickly becomes overwhelmed in new environments. For the better well-being of Christopher, Ed tends to be very overprotective of him. An example of this is shown when Christopher wants to do detective work to find out who killed Wellington. This idea suggests that Christopher has to talk to strangers which he is not comfortable with.

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When Christopher discovers the letters his mother wrote him that his father tried to hide from him, he says, “Then I stopped reading the letter because I felt sick. Mother had not had a heart attack. Mother had not died. Mother had been alive all the time. And Father had lied about this.”

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Christopher has think idea about his mom that he finds out shortly in the story that wasn 't true. He has the idea that his mother is dead and died in the hospital from being sick. He doesn 't think much about this, he doesn 't really seem concerned or really even sad. Later on he finds out that his mother and his neighbors husband had an affair and that she didn 't die she just left his father. when he find out about this he still doesn 't think much of the emotional part of what 's going on, he just wants to figure out the mystery of who killed wellington.

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That meant he could murder me because I couldn’t trust him, even though he had said “Trust me,” because he had told a lie about a big thing… Which meant that I had to go to London to live with Mother” (Haddon 122-131). The quote explains how he will make a big decision with no one’s help or advice; this shows coming-of-age since it describes how he is ready to be independent by making his own choices, even knowing the risks that will happen. As the novel progresses, Haddon uses conflict frequently in the novel to show the theme coming-of-age theme. On page 193, a scene shows Christopher deciding on whom to stay with. For example, it states, “And there was a policeman outside the door, and he said, “Are you Christopher Boone?”

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That Christopher did not feel safe anymore in his home, and “Really Frightened” shows that Christopher doesn’t have

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When he leaves for Alaska, the man that has been helping him, Franz, asks to adopt him as a grandson. Christopher tells him that he needs to travel to Alaska alone first and when he gets back they can talk about it. This proves that Christopher needed to do things on his own to truly understand the world. Finally, he realized that nature can be harsh and uncaring as well. When he started running out of supplies to survive he came to that conclusion because he was soon not going to have anything.

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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).

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After this statement Christopher goes on to explain every detail that he noticed within the countryside, and even told us that there were 31 other details that he did not put into his book! The

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This can be shown through when Christopher said "I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”. The metaphor used is meant to truly show us why Christopher likes it when it rains. This also shows us that Christopher’s experiences with being on the autistic spectrum and having to deal with a lot of unwanted sounds caused him to find comfort in white noise. We are made aware of another coping mechanism Christopher uses when he said "I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057, but I don't know how to be normal.

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Christopher grew up without knowing much about the world and life it self. He acts as what many would say a child. This is due to his Aspergers. In the beginning of the novel Christopher explains what he thinks of life.

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Christopher finds spoken language difficult when too many things are being discussed at once, which can be seen from his reaction to the police interrogating him at the crime scene of the dog’s murder. As the questions were being asked, Christopher had difficulties processing all of them. He reacts to the multiple questions with this line in the book: “He was asking me too many questions and he was asking them too quickly.” Another line to note is “I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world.” These two lines show that he had a very difficult time keeping up with the pacing.

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