The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a book written by Mark Haddon. It is written in the perspective of a young boy with autism writing the book himself.
Christopher lives with his mother and father in Swindon, United Kingdom. He has autism and struggles greatly with everyday life while excelling in math. One day he notices that his neighbors dog has been brutally murdered with a garden fork and decides to 'do detecting' to find out who the killer was. The hunt for the murderer and the questions that comes from his detecting takes Christopher places he never thought he'd go.This book certainly challenges the reader to see things from a new perspective. I would go as far as saying the book invites the reader to see the world in a completely different way.
From the start it is clear that the protagonist has a different way of doing things. The book divulges everyday details that would not be deemed important enough to be featured in other stories. An example of this can be seen when the boy purchases a train ticket, and every single step is described down to how much each coin he got as change was worth. Reading such scenes made me question how authors select what is important? How is it normally decided that the value of the coins is not relevant to the story? Furthermore, I wondered how the central character would react to books that didn't disclose the details that he found most important.
Another interesting thing I took away from reading the book was how the boy's brain never seemed to rest. My life for instance is divided into years, weeks, days, hours and so on. The central character seemed to have another perspective on time which is illustrated in the way he writes the book. It's especially apparent with the way 'he' starts sentences with the word 'and'. Of course a person who has gone through the regular Swedish schooling system knows this is not grammatically correct and him doing it might be a result of him having gone through special education. However, I think this reflects how his brain just won't shut off and all of his days blend together into one.
As one last reflection, I would like to bring up how calculated the boy was in the way he lived his life. His mind seemed to work like a computer and each decision seemed to be based on an advanced formula. Love or other emotions didn't have any power in his brain. I wonder how society would look had this characteristic been the way people without autism worked too?
