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

1102 Words5 Pages

Nobody is lying… but maybe they should be
Do people hear Yanny or Laurel? Or brainstorm or green needle? Or even lies being told by people known and loved most, which is probably the most heard thing of the examples mentioned. This may come across as a bad thing, but “we should be thinking critically about when lying might be the right thing to do” (www.fastcompany.com). In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, people get to see the effects of certain lies on a teenager with Asperger’s named Christopher. Haddon shows that the lies Christopher’s father tell to Christopher make Christopher learn to feel sympathy towards his mother. Christopher also learns to feel sympathy for his father through his father’s lies. These lies teach Christopher that he has no reason to feel badly for himself because of his disabilities or capabilities. Christopher shouldn’t be lied to, but the fact that the key people in his life do lie to him, helps him, given that Christopher shows signs of understanding feelings and sympathy after being lied to, which is huge considering he has Asperger’s. The lies Christopher are told help him learn to feel sympathy for his mom. Lies can hurt feelings, but in some …show more content…

When you come to realize that some lies are told to protect you, you begin to understand where the person was coming from, which can even lead to doing things together to regain your trust. When Christopher comes home, his dad has lots of explaining to do, and with the help of Judy, Christopher begins to warm up to him again to the point where he and his “father made a vegetable patch in the garden” (Haddon 220). This isn’t the only time he put in an effort to understand why his father was

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The role of adults play a crucial role in Christopher’s life, and his father is no exception. Ed Boone has been seen as a negative influence,, as he forces Christopher to be secretive, is very unstable, and uses crude language and physical force on his son, as well as lying about crucial parts of Christopher’s life. Christopher’s father often goes to extremes when demonstrating his emotions, occasionally blowing up in anger, and he lacks the confidence to work through his problems verbally. When trying to explain himself he stutters and stops and often has trouble connecting sentences. Like Christopher, he has very few friends—Rhodri is the only one the novel mentions.

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Throughout the course of Christopher’s life, he begins to realize that lying is not always the wrong thing to do. Christopher’s initial motto were alone the lines of, honesty is the best policy. Christopher said to the officer, “’Yes I always tell the truth.’” (Haddon 18) which strongly implies that he truly values honesty.

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