The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime By Mark Haddon

Describe an important event.
Explain how this helped you understand the idea.

The novel ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ by Mark Haddon is set in modern day Swindon, in England. An important event in this story is when Christopher finds letters that his mother had sent to him , therefore finding out that his mother had not died. This leads to him leaving to London to find his mother, and his dad confessing about killing Wellington. This helped me understand the idea because it shows that Christopher really believed that his Mother had died, (because he didn’t think anyone would lie to him. "A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place… which I why everything I have written here is true.”), but then finding out his dad had him believing that she was dead.
This event is important because he finds out that his father had lied to him and his mother was not really dead.
He feels sick because his father had lied (Christopher does not like it when people lie). Christopher gets a headache and feels sick after finding out. Soon after his father found Christopher reading the letters, his father also admits that he had killed Wellington, which just made it too much for Christopher, and he decides he is not safe at home. He thinks that because his Father had killed the dog, he might kill Christopher. This particular event showed us that Christopher has strange thought patterns, even though he is a very logical thinker such as when he said "Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about
them."

The event helped me understand the idea because it showed that one lie caused Christopher to have a big headache. This helped me understand that Christopher has a thinking pattern different from others. No everyday person would think about "And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air…just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling". Christopher thinks strangely about ordinary things; even though he has a high IQ, he has trouble relating to people because he cannot read of facial expression what they are thinking and cannot relate to them. When Christopher says "I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk." I think he may be implying that he finds it hard to understand humans while dogs are a lot easier to understand.

I enjoyed this novel because it portrayed that other people have different think than us. I think that we should all learn to accept other people’s views. My opinion of this novel is that it was a very good novel and that it was very descriptive. I enjoyed reading this novel because it was interesting and had lots of ideas in it

Sam Lu