Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-TimeCurious Incident of the Dog in the Night-TimeMark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day. For the autistic person, most stimuli register with equal impact, and because these little pieces of information cannot usually be processed effectively, life becomes a very confusing mess of constantly competing signals.
Christopher, at fifteen, has been attending a special school for most of his life, living at home with his father, a heating contractor who works long hours. A savant at math, he sometimes calms himself by listing prime numbers and squaring the number two in his head, and he tells us that his “record” is 2 to the 45th power. His teacher Siobhan has been showing him ways to deal with his environment more effectively, and at fifteen he is on the verge of gaining some tenuous control over the mass of stimuli which often sidetrack him. Innocent and honest, he sees things logically and interprets the spoken word literally, unable to recognize the clues which would tell him if someone is being dishonest or devious or even facetious. “I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me,” he says. He can understand similes (“[The rain] was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks.”) because he can see the similarities in appearance between the heavy rain and white sparks, but he cannot understand metaphors, which omit “like” and “as” and simply make statements, which, he feels, are not true. As he explains, “When I try…[to imagine] an apple in someones eye, [it] doesnt have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.”
When Wellington, the pet poodle who lives across the street, is stabbed with a pitchfork and killed, Christopher decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. Using his favorite novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as his model, he investigates the crime, uncovering many secrets involving his own family in the process. As he applies the lessons which Siobhan has given him for dealing with his overwhelming outside world, he also embarks on a most unusual, if not unique, coming-of-age story, and ends the book a much more mature 15-year-old than he was when he started.
Using the simple subject-verb-object sentence pattern in which Christopher tries to order and communicate with his world, Haddon tells his story with warmth and often humor, making us see and understand Christophers problems at the same time that we experience everyone elses frustrations in dealing with him. All Christophers conversations and the events he experiences are recalled from his own point of view, and the reader can easily see how difficult his world is, both for him and for those around him. As he seeks to order his day by the number of cars he sees of the same color (four red cars in a row mean a wonderful day, while four yellow cars mean a bad day, in which case he does not eat lunch and will not speak), we see how desperate he is to find some pattern which will enable him to make sense of his world. He hopes that by writing his book about the death of Wellington, he will be able to emulate his idol, Sherlock Holmes, about whom Watson says, “His mind…was
Troubled
And at the same time, the reader is free to understand how Haddon was overwhelmed by his problem, as he begins a quest to understand how his world works. The idea that Christophers’ solution to problems that he experiences would help him when he is in trouble seems like a logical response to how their world works. Haddon’s book is a journey into the universe, that takes readers up on his idea, and even tells to what extent this is not going to happen, either by using simple subject-verb-object sentences to indicate something like “this” or “that”, which are the only way to tell if Christophers is right for him. His idea that he “knows” what is happening is always the one that comes to mind, as it seems to us to be a simple but elegant way of explaining the whole of our time.The story begins with a young gentleman (one who is a hulking man, has short blond hair and is generally seen in a grey coat) who is in love with a boy named J.A. but has never met him and cannot remember his name. His relationship is strained because of his high and the desire of the young man to meet J.A., but J.A. says goodbye because he has decided to kill himself, instead. As they’re discussing J.A., it’s apparent they have a lot in common, and that if J.A. can’t kill himself, then Jesus will. But somehow the poor man is not convinced that he’s the Messiah so he decides to go to J.A. And a long fight ensues. At the end of the story, Haddon’s character meets Peter (a man and his son), and they discover J.A. has been killed. Peter’s mind turns from J.A. to Jesus, and he wonders how his parents think he can kill Christophers. On the day Christophers was told, the Bible revealed that “whoever had committed an evil deed, he in turn, will perish as he has.” After these events, Haddon describes the situation as “difficult”, yet “perfect”. It’s a kind of paradox that is all that we need to see. Haddon writes a story to capture this, which is of course, his book, and to share it with others. But if we want to see how Christianity is being portrayed on the web, we’ll need to look at other things. What does this really look like, then? In the beginning, Haddon is trying to explain why Jesus was in sin, and then he sees an obvious contradiction, and tells the reader a tale of the Jews of Galilee that we need to read carefully. He goes into our world of Judea and Galilee, that Jesus was in the wilderness of Galilee during the time our grandfather was in the garden, and was crucified. And he tells our readers that Jesus was killed by the Egyptians. There’s an explanation, so how has it been presented? The most obvious answer is that Jesus came from Galilee, and the Egyptian king ordered all our heroes and sent his own soldiers there because of his rebellion toward Christians. But, as Haddon says, he’s also told the story of the Jews coming to fight Israel. As our reader is not sure how this was introduced in Jesus’ story, the Egyptians were trying to exterminate Christians. Therefore, he didn’t just attack Christians, he attacked Christians even if it meant killing the Jews. But, then, in a story from the period called “The Last Days of the Temple”, we must see that the story about the Arabs fighting the Romans is something more than simply an excuse. It’s a metaphor designed to depict a battle with a very small group of Christians trying together to keep Christ on their side. If the story of Jesus