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The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Essay

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Avoidance In the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Christopher is stunned about the truth about his mother and refuses to acknowledge the facts. People try to avoid the truth of unwanted information about themselves for numerous reasons like having to change their beliefs, the lack of control, and a cause of unpleasant emotions. People try to avoid the truth about themselves because they fear that they would have to change their beliefs. Subconsciously humans always try to seek information that prove and confirm their beliefs and do not look for answers that disprove them. A real life example is one of my own. As a child I believed that Barney and many other fictional characters were actually real life …show more content…

If we knew that we could not do something about the information that we would receive there would not be a necessity to know about it. An example would be given bad news that you cannot do anything about. Say that your doctor diagnoses that you have a form of terminal cancer and you have a few weeks to live. How would this information help you in a beneficial way? When you feel like you have little to no control of the consequences of information you are strongly motivated to avoid it or simply not believe it. This is one of the reasons why Christopher does not believe in Heaven. Christopher says, “I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying… the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things in the rubbish.” (61.7). Christopher feels like faith is unnecessary because there is no truth to it. He says that people cannot accept the fact that they simply die . Knowing that there is no control over the matter at hand people simply would look the other way and avoid it because there would be no psychological or physical benefits of knowing information that is inevitable. If the information is not valuable there is no need to know about it. In the end people try to flee from a situation in which they feel powerless and cannot do anything about it like being told they have terminal

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