The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The fifteen-year-old narrator of The Curious Incident, Christopher Boone, experiences many advances and setbacks during the events of the novel. From his calm, ordered, routine at home in Swindon to the terrifying inaccessible chaos of London, Christopher undergoes a series of advances and setbacks. Christopher's adventures to discover who killed his neighbor's dog are motivated by his autistic preoccupation with logic, order, and deduction. Christopher's affliction makes him highly adept, genius even, at factoring problems, math, memorization and other mental processes, yet he cannot interpret and cannot offer emotion. For Christopher, all the patterns and colors of life (i.e. emotions) are censored, leaving him focused on pure logic and mathematics, "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" (Haddon 2003). However, in the end of the novel, things remain basically unchanged for Christopher, primarily because his world will always remain one viewed through the particular prison of autism.

Christopher introduces us to his story by explaining a dead dog, stuck through with a garden fork. His neighbor, Mrs. Shears, blames him for the death initially. Through a brilliant series of faces drawn with different emotions, we understand that Christopher cannot read or express emotion. Though his phot