The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ is all about perspective. Although Mark Haddon does not specifically relate to readers that Christopher, the main protagonist and narrator of the text suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, the text explores how the fifteen-year-old teenager views the people and events which surround him. Taking this disability into account and as readers explore the text, readers realise that the unreliable narration of the first-person perspective is made even more skewed because of how differently Christopher views things, so much so that even learning about the true nature and motivations of his father Ed and mother Judy’s actions are threatened. However, this is not quite the case, seeing that more discerning readers are able to interpret the matters of the heart and mind more easily than Christopher.

Christopher’s perception and view on people and events in life becomes somewhat limited simply because he suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. Whilst viewing the world in which Christopher learns to adapt to from one person’s perspective, that is, Christopher’s, is questionable, the narration tends to become even more unreliable because he does what he calls and accuses others of doing ‘glancing’. Christopher accusers others of not really seeing something that is there and seems to relish in the certainty of the knowledge in which he has set for himself that just like his role model ‘Sherlock Holmes’, who is able to ‘detach his mind at will’ from the events before him, he also can ‘detach his mind’ at will in order to stay detached and to stop the ‘hurting inside (his) head’. However, from the reader’s perspective, Christopher is in fact ‘just being observant’ and being the more discerning viewers, readers are able to distinguish the deception, motivations and intentions of other characters far beyond what Christopher thinks he is capable of.

It is mid-way through the text that readers find out, with Christopher, that his father Ed Boone has killed the dog Wellington. From Christopher’s eyes, his father has lied to him by not telling him of this deed, in which case, Christopher interprets as his father not loving him because to Christopher, ‘loving someone is telling them the truth.’ Secondly, Christopher relates best to dogs: ‘I like dogs very much’ because both are somewhat similar in that they have four distinct moods of ‘happy, sad, cross and concentrating’. Finding out his father has just killed something that Christopher prizes without doubt shakes all that he is ever taught to know. Readers, on the other hand can understand that it is out of the frustration and desperation of being expected to maintain the responsibility of looking after a child with ‘Behavioural Problems’ that has perhaps driven Ed to kill the dog, in conjunction with losing a wife and thus feeling isolated and all alone.

Readers also fall upon the knowledge, as with Christopher, that Ed has been secretly hiding his mother Judy’s letter from him and has led Christopher to believe that she is dead. Once again, Christopher perceives this on face-value and his first reaction is that his father does not love him and could