From my perspective

I finally read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.  My mother has been talking about this book after she read it for a class in graduate school on special education so I knew that the book was about a boy with Asperger’s.  While I thought a book about someone with a severe disability would be difficult to understand and hard to relate to, it actually was easy to read and I was able to empathize with the main character.

The book is narrated by Christopher Boone, a 15 year old English boy with Asperger’s syndrome.  One night he discovers that the neighbor’s dog has been murdered with a garden fork.  He decides to find out who killed the dog and write a book about it.  While it sounds like a murder mystery, it’s really a book about Christopher and another mystery about his family.

            The book is written from the point of view of Christopher.  We learn a lot about him from what he says and does and from the structure of the book. He introduces himself as “knowing all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.”  He doesn’t like strange places or people he doesn’t know.  He doesn’t like to be touched.  If his senses get overloaded, he will curl into a ball and groan.  He hates the colors yellow and brown so much so that he can’t eat or touch anything yellow or brown.  He needs order and will do math problems in his head just to calm down.  Time is very important to Christopher.  He times everything that he does.  Over the course of the book, you know Christopher so well that you can anticipate how he will react to the events and people around him.  As unusual as he is, you understand his perspective because you are immersed in it.

Christopher’s point of view is even noticeable in the structure of the book. The chapters are numbered in prime numbers because he likes the order they provide. Because Christopher is a visual learner, he uses visuals to explain things.  The book is filled with different fonts (bold and italics) and charts, graphs, mathematical equations, pictures and diagrams.  Like Christopher, sometimes the book jumps around from subject to subject and contains run-on sentences showing the way Christopher thinks.  The book is very repetitive because Christopher is repetitive and consistent.  The author cleverly uses Christopher’s disability as a writing style to allow you to understand Christopher as well as to think and feel like Christopher.

            While Christopher has an unusual perspective due to his disability, it soon becomes normal to the reader.  By providing detailed explanations of Christopher’s thoughts and feelings about everything from physics to the supernatural, I could really understand and empathize with Christopher.  Underneath all of Christopher’s quirky characteristics, Christopher makes sense.  In contrast, the behaviors of the other “normal” characters in the book, like Christopher’s father and mother seem more odd than Christopher’s behavior.  Christopher’s mother had an affair and then abandoned him.   Christopher’s father makes up a story that his mother has died.   Christopher’s mother’s abandonment and father’s lie seem more crazy than Christopher’s peculiarity.   The book has taught me to look beyond the surface of people’s behavior and try to understand their perspective