The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

The most frequent phenomenon in contemporary literature is where a protagonist is described as mentally or socially limited due to an internal or external influence. This explanation is generally mentioned clearly in the plot. In Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the author writes about Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy. What distinguishes this novel is its ability to dive through new imagery by a mixture of language and setting. Instead of providing a distorted view of mental illness, this book, being written in the first person, brilliantly portrays the mind of a person with autism without being sentimental or condescending (Andrade 474).

Even though he has exceptional talent in Math, Christopher has certain behavioral disabilities which he himself identifies in the story. One of them is his inability to communicate with others very well. He also finds it difficult to adhere to social norms. All his personality and behavioral quirks make it easy for the reader to label him and box him into a certain category of people. However, due to Christopher developing an awareness of his own limitations near the novel’s end, people also potentially change their initial judgment, generalization, and stereotyping of the hero’s behavior and realize that he is not the Christopher that they originally perceived him to be at the beginning.

The book teaches people, especially medical and health practitioners, to resist a quick initial diagnosis and collect more information about a person. In the book we see that Christopher’s behavioral disability is a result of how people surrounding him have labeled him.

The Use of Language

The astute use of language and the way it cleverly conceals labels and diagnosis until the very end is what sets this novel apart. In the beginning, the author does not explicitly state Christopher’s condition and relies on the perception that the first-person narrator, which is Christopher himself, has Autistic spectrum disorder. As Christopher writes a journal on his neighbor’s dog Wellington’s death, he often engages in descriptions of himself. There are clues to show Christopher’s characterization in the novel. It is “achieved explicitly via ”self-presentation” from the novel” (Semino 282). For instance, early in the novel Christopher describes ”how he hit a policeman because he had touched him, which resulted in Christopher being arrested and detained at the local police station; Knocking his classmate Sarah unconsciously because she pulls his hair”(Haddon). These words show us how Christopher communicates differently compared to other people. Christopher’s atypical behavior often brings him into troubles. This behavior also makes people jump to snap judgments about him and easily define or label Christopher as a person who has a ”disability”.

Apart from self-presentation, the novel also deploys what Culpeper (2001, in Semino 282) defined as ‘other-presentation’, that is, the texts which narrate what other people say about a character. Christopher describes in full detail what other people say about him and also often says how he feels about it. For instance, he describes his outrage over the fact that one of the students in the school he attends says that ”he will only get a job collecting supermarket trollies or cleaning out donkey shit at an animal sanctuary” (Haddon 33). On a different occasion, a policeman describes Christopher as a ”fine specimen” (Haddon 188).

Interestingly, Christopher’s vocabulary in the book is also special. It appears that he does not know the meaning of very common words, but is very adept at scientific topics that are of interest to him. He also finds it a challenge to provide the detailed information, which is normally expected from a boy of his age (Semino 295).

The Environment

Christopher is living in a disabling environment. People are never explicitly ”made aware of what makes Christopher ”not normal,“ but his ostensible ”disability“ — possibly Asperger’s Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism”(Ray, n.p.). People surrounding Christopher represent the majority — and therefore privileged — group in the society, whose actions are seen as ‘normal’. What constitutes normal in the book is seen as ordinary people going about their tasks and businesses, conforming to the society’s expectations, saying the right thing at the right time, and being ‘proper’.

However, their seeming normalcy does not give them the right to judge people who are like Christopher. Often, the labels that people surreptitiously put on Christopher are what defines him as dysfunctional and different, making it difficult for Christopher to be accepted by other people. For example, Christopher’s ”many unique requirements and rituals on food of certain colors” confuse others and make them wonder ”how to deal with him” (Haddon). To a casual observer, Christopher’s behavior is opposite to the social norms, and he often does weird things, which ”boxes” him into a certain category.

Throughout the entire book, we see how people in Christopher’s immediate environment label him. The book also shows how Christopher is affected by these labels. Because his disability is highlighted, people tend to ignore Christopher’s brilliance in Math and Science. His talent deserves recognition, but it is overshadowed by the image and persona that people have ascribed to him. It is unfair that his disability is amplified, and his strengths are not recognized.

In the article “Normalcy, Knowledge, and Nature in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, the author Sarah Jaquette Ray mentions that ”Christopher is in a special education class is the strongest evidence that he has a disability, but, as we will see, a disability studies perspective suggests that this evidence is more a reflection of how society perceives Christopher than an ontological reality” (Ray, n.p.). Through Christopher’s views on the social construction of disability, we also realize that people are quick to label and identify what a person is without going through further investigation. There are many reasons behind this, particularly because our brains are hardwired to associate certain behaviors with certain names. However, the merits of inquiry and investigation help people understand the details. We should not pass judgment at the onset before obtaining sufficient insight into people’s characters and minds.

In the novel, Haddon writes that Christopher has ”special needs”. Going through the whole book, Haddon never uses the word ”Asperger” to describe Christopher. Haddon does not intend to ”negatively stereotype those with Asperger’s” (Haller, n.p.). What he wants to express is letting people understand the importance of not stereotyping others by the first impression. The whole story by Haddon is seen through the eyes of the main character. From the perspective of Christopher himself as the first-person narrator, we feel we are within Christopher’s mind (Haller, n.p.).

Conclusion

As the author Elena Semino mentions in ”Language, mind and autism in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, the amount of the first-person singular pronouns in Haddon’s novel is unusually high. In the book, there is the creation of the impression that ”Christopher is unusually self-focused, has difficulties understanding the mental states of others, and seldom feels a sense of affinity and commonality with them” (Semino 280). These description shows readers come of Christopher’s character features — self-centred, has difficulty sensing others’ feelings, like when he mentions that he does not “notice when people are angry with him”. These actions show that Christopher is just used to living in his structure; in his particular structure, he does things on his own and solves problems by his very rigidly defined comfort zone. His ”abnormal” behavior also makes him be rejected by society.

In the current society, people easily label others judging by the first impression. People can be labeled aberrantly since individuals have different perspectives. Doing this regularly, we will no longer see things as they actually are. In the novel, during Christopher’s trip to London, everyone around him stays anonymous. People which Christopher meets on the road consider him a little weird but not abnormal. He successfully goes to the train station, buys the tickets, arrives to London, and eventually finds his mother. Although sometimes he might seem out of his mind, he learns to calm himself down by solving math problems and communicating with other people for advice. It seems that Christopher is capable of living a normal life. Like Sarah Ray mentioned in her article, ”Writing about Christopher from any other point of view would have undermined the novel’s critique of dominant ableist society: ‘normal’ is not an absolute; it is a social construction that reflects more about society than a person’s mental or physical attributes” (Ray, n.p.). Maybe, it is so mostly because the people in Christopher’s town do not notice his changes and maintain the initial viewpoint.

Throughout the whole book, Christopher’s behavior gradually makes us change the views on him. It is a hasty judgment when we label someone as abnormal just because they are not like what we expect them to be. Like in the beginning, we see Christopher as a boy with Asperger’s because he acts not like ”normal” people do. However, later, Christopher always breaks our prejudice and shows us he can do the things just like the majority of people do. In the book, people need not only to reconsider Christopher’s performance, but also re-examine their behavior and not be hasty in their labeling.

Works Cited

Andrade, Chittaranjan.”The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Review.” Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 9, no. 6, 2007, p. 474

Haller, Beth. ”Book and Film Reviews: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4, 2004, dsq-sds.org/article/view/914/1089

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. ”Normalcy, Knowledge, and Nature in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3, 2013, dsq-sds.org/article/view/3233/3263

Semino, Elena. ”Language, mind, and autism in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time.” In: Fludernik, M. and Jacob, D. (eds.), Linguistics and Literary Studies, 2014. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 279-303.