Curious Incident

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time gave me an interesting take on what it is like to have autism as an adolescent. As I continued to read through the story, I felt like he was always overwhelmed with information. Words, sounds, sights, and actions stuck out to him significantly more than they would an average person. I could not imagine how stressful it would be to really never be able to give your brain a break. He was never able to shut everything out and just be himself.
I connected with this book on some level, because I have a member in my family who is special needs, so I have seen some of the challenges that come with that. She is an adolescent with Down Syndrome, so it is different than autism, but it is still difficult to deal with. There was one time specifically that I remember walking through the subways of New York City with her and the rest of my family when someone yelled at her for walking too slowly. She could not speak up for herself and say, “I have Down Syndrome,” because she does not completely understand it. This is similar to Christopher in many ways—one being with the first police officer. The officer did not know that he had autism, so he responded to him very harshly. There was also the time that he was going through the train station in London and people were getting frustrated with him. Haddon did a great job bringing attention to how society treats those with special needs as a whole.
The only problems I would really have with this text are how Haddon included all of the math problems, addresses, and signs that Christopher saw. For me, those were the parts that I got a little bit lost in. I was so busy keeping up with all of the different places that I missed the point sometimes. Maybe that was what Haddon meant to do, though. Maybe he meant to make it just as overwhelming for me as it was for Christopher.

Comments

  1. Kiara McVaySeptember 25, 2019 at 6:08 PM

    I too have a younger cousin who is special needs as well (I should’ve added that in my blog post) however she is in her adolescence stage as of right now (she’s 15) and she has trouble understanding certain things as well. One thing she does is always ask us our emotions as well she likes to say “You sleepy?” when we aren’t even tired which just reminded me of how Christopher struggled with understanding others emotions.

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  2. Tiara A WintonSeptember 25, 2019 at 7:20 PM

    Thank you for telling us about your family member. Outside of a required course for college i have no experience with children on the spectrum. I understand your frustration with reading the added material about math, and addresses and this part confused me as well. It wasn't until after rereading that I finally realized that Christopher focuses so heavily on logic because of his disconnect with "normal" social interaction.

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