Curious Blog

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After reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time for a second time, I now have a better understanding of the autism spectrum and some insight as to what could go on inside the mind of an autistic person. I initially read this novel in my 12th grade English class, but we skipped around so much because of the language used by adult figures in the book that most of us didn't really get anything out of reading it. The only aspects I remembered were Christopher's hatred of yellow and brown and that dad killed Wellington. Other than that, the plot, themes, character development, and other major aspects of this novel did not stick because my teacher, who was not one of my favorites, picked and prodded at the novel so much that it began taking away the bigger picture as to why we were reading the book in the first place. I feel like the language of the adults in this novel adds to the characterization of Christopher. His father especially has a terrible tongue and curses at Christopher when he becomes frustrated with him,  mostly just dropping F bombs left and right. This makes Christopher seem more standoffish towards his father, and with other adults who talk down to him, too. So this go around, I looked more at the structure and Christopher's verbiage. I know several individuals that fall on the autism spectrum and tried to compare and contrast those individuals and their quirks to Christopher and his quirks. Christopher makes the chapters of his "novel" all prime numbers and explains to the reader what a prime number is and why he uses those for the titles of his chapters. He also talks in multiple run-on sentence form when he gets excited about a topic or conversation, like on page (insert page number) when he's talking (find convo) and starts saying "and this" and "and that." I connected this with a young autistic girl I work with who is not as high functioning as Christopher, but has similar behaviors. Instead of being good with math, she is good with dates, like saying, "what day of the week was June 23rd, 1980 on?" and she can tell you within seconds what day it was. She also get excited about certain topics and starts talking in run-on-sentence type speech.

I think that Haddon did an excellent job portraying an autistic adolescent, especially with all of the minor details he put into the creation of Christopher, like his quirks and his speech. For someone who has been exposed to autism in several different environments, I've seen almost all of the behaviors that Haddon compiled into Christopher portrayed by different individuals in my life or out in public. I could see this book as being a talking point for individuals who do not know much about the disorder to gather an understanding of what it is potentially like for those living with autism.

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