The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time

A scream emerges. Everyone looks around, surprised to see a young adult, crying and rolling on the ground. Someone tries to help him. He hits the person and screams again. This is Christopher John Francis Boone, the main character of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This novel doesn’t have one specific theme because it is written with the perspective of Christopher, an autistic young adult who doesn’t get typical things the way I, and most people do. Christopher is autistic. He doesn’t get normal things. In the story I got frustrated, because of Christopher’s autism, he never got to the point where I wanted him to be. His disability really took that away from him. When his teacher, Siobhan asks him to write a book, Christopher thinks he is supposed to write facts about his life, he doesn’t realize that it is supposed to have a theme. He starts the book thinking that he is just writing about himself. In the beginning he just writes facts, until something very important to him happens; a dog
died. Christopher is more caring for animals than he is for humans, so this might be the reason he wrote about the dog and why he decided to solve the mystery of it’s death. To Christopher investigating the dog’s death is more crucial to him than anything else in his life at the moment, some things are more important to him than they are to us. One of the main reasons that the book doesn’t have one specific theme is that Christopher doesn’t think it’s necessary, like he thinks other things are. Because Christopher is autistic the narration of the story is told from a distorted point of view.
If the story had any other narrator the reader would not be able to appreciate Christopher’s struggle. Say the book were written with Siobhan’s perspective, it would have had a lot of assumptions. For example, she would assume that he screamed because he was frightened, or she would assume that he didn’t like yellow because it was related to something bad that happened and yellow was the only color he realized of the scene. But, because this book is written in Christopher’s point of view, you really have more sympathy and patience for him. Also, it is written in a 15 year old’s eyes. If it had been written in an adult’s point of view, like his dad, the reader may know the complete story of how and why the dog died and why it affected Christopher in such a meaningful way. But because it is written in a limited point of view, it doesn’t seem to support a
theme. Since the book was written in an autistic 15 year old’s point of view, it added sympathy and compassion. Yet, it was also written in a form that was frustrating as a reader, it was very choppy and jumbled. Reading the story through Christopher’s point of view brought forward the struggle of his everyday life, like how he distinguished if it was going to be a good day or a bad day by just looking at cars. Reading it this way was a challenge. Overall the story accomplished perhaps what the author hoped, that you could really try to understand how autistic people think and how they reacted to certain things.