The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

In the novel ‘A curious incident of the Dog in the Night-time’, Christopher Boone learns many important life lessons. Throughout his journey he learns that he can’t be in control all the time and not everything has logical explanations. As Christopher investigates Wellington’s death, he makes some brave decisions and discovers he is far more capable of controlling his behaviour and dealing with his fears than he realized. Although Christopher’s Journey is a story of growth, overcoming your fears and dealing with the consequences of ones own actions, readers begin to comprehend that although Christopher learns a great deal about himself and the world, learning doesn’t necessarily mean change and we see that due to Christopher’s condition, change isn’t entirely possible.

Christopher is extremely logical, removed from his feelings and can only respond with logic or anger. If people touch him, he will hit them, If his senses become ‘overloaded’ or his brain ‘too confused’, he will curl up in a ball and groan loudly, perhaps for hours at a time. His world needs order and precision and he will do a math problem in his head for hours just to pass the time or distract him from an unpleasant situation. His love for order explains his need for mathematics, which is entirely based on logic, not emotion. Christopher relies on order throughout his day to day life and his dislike for unfamiliar situations has always limited his abilities.

His journey to London proves to be just as difficult as his familiar world is thrown into chaos and he must learn to cope with new situations. On the train Christopher is frightened as he has never been on his own before and the loud noises and people make him feel like there is a ‘balloon inside [his] chest’. Christopher’s solution to the problem was to shut himself in a cupboard so ‘[he] couldn’t hear people talking’ and ‘solve quadratic equations’. It is in this moment we see just how desperate he is to find some pattern which will enable him to make sense of the world.

Although by the end of the novel it is evident that Christopher learns that life like math’s isn’t as predictable as he once believed, he remains unchanged and continues to revert back to his old behaviour insisting on sitting the math’s A level exam. Even though his mother is clearly distressed and [she] is close to ‘losing it’, Christopher cannot understand these emotions and remains unaware of the pressure he is putting on her, proving that his main focus is still with math’s and not on his relationship with his parents.

Christopher struggles to read the emotions of others and understanding his own feelings, explaining his emotions as a mental process that is ‘comparable to a computer’. Christopher doesn’t like to be touched and finds it difficult to express affection as he ‘finds people confusing’ because they ‘do a lot of talking without using any words’. When Christopher is told that his mother is in hospital he isn’t upset by the news but excited because of the ‘uniforms and machines’. When she dies