Review of "The Curious Incident of the dog in the Nighttime"
Mark Haddon's novel, "The Curious Incident of the dog in the Nighttime", is an autobiographical murder mystery narrated from the perspective of an autistic teenager, Christopher Boone. Throughout the text, Haddon astutely positions the audience to experience life from the perspective of someone who cannot hope to grasp the subtle nuances of human interactions and social norms. "The Curious Incident of the dog in the Nighttime" essay shows how from the perspective of a highly unconventional narrator, Haddon explores everyday settings and events, allowing him to portray interesting ideas about the differences that exist both within the nuanced world he created and in contemporary society as a whole.
The novel's structure and genre are immediately subverted, allowing Haddon to portray attention-grabbing details about the narrative organisation. Within the opening chapter, the text seems to follow the genre of a typical crime novel by starting with a murder scene with short, sharp sentences intended to form tension “It was 7 minutes after midnight”. Haddon develops a deadpan narrative and emoticons to convey his story; the audience understands that this text will be anything but conventional. Throughout his murder investigation, Christopher Boone applies all the structural features of a mystery novel to his story. He frequently uses jargon associated with the genre, such as “red herrings”, “prime suspect” referring to Mr, Shears and frequently making intertextual references to popular crime fiction novels such as The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unlike other crime fiction novels, the climate solution occurs in the middle of the text, for example, Ed Boone sincerely admits both the murder of the dog and disguises the whereabouts of Christopher's mother. With the assassination of the dog settled, Christopher's focus now shifts from his investigation to discovering his independence away from his father, with whom he no longer feels safe “I had to get out of the house. Father had murdered Wellington. That meant he could murder me”. From this point on, as Christopher first exercises his freedom, the text genre changes from the mystery of murder to the Bildungsroman. Leaving the familiar world of Swindon, Christopher must overcome his ASD's impediments in exploring his way independently to London, shifting the focus of the text to Christopher's coming-of-age. Haddon embraces an alternative way of storytelling by changing the genre halfway through the text, which is both non-linear and subject to change, engaging with the reader and more readily living.
Haddon offers his audience a vigorous understanding of how individual’s communicate with each other by choosing for his text an unconventional narrator. As a result of his ASD, Christopher's alternative communication methods are addressed by introducing emoticons towards the novel's beginning. Christopher says that while he was able to recognise happiness and sadness, “unable to say what these (other emoticons) meant”. This emphasises Christopher's powerlessness in grasping the nuances of social correspondence that structure within the novel, the basis of many unintentionally comedic events. For example, Christopher and his father spread their fingers into a fan and let their “fingers and thumbs touch each other” to impart love without causing sensory overload. This emotional exchange is initially heart-warming, but later in Christopher's text, a stranger is threatened with a knife and the man backs his fingers spread like “he wanted to say he loved me”. Christopher's powerlessness to understand the body's language allows the audience to appreciate the assumptions embedded in social norms and urges the audience to take this aspect of life from a totally different perspective. This is further conveyed as the communication methods used by Christopher physically shape the text. When Christopher wants to emphasise a point or concept, he uses capitalisation to highlight ideas such as “Behaviour Problems” or “Super Good Day”. The use of capitalisation later becomes garbled graphics that physically represent Christopher's sensory overload experience caused by the signs of London. This text also includes other digressions to communicate Christopher's unique thinking patterns to the audience, such as constellation diagrams. In this way, Haddon positions the viewer to consider the world from the perspective of someone with ASD and develop empathy for those who think differently.
One aspect of the text that most diverges from the norm is the realistic portrayal of Haddon's contemporary family unit. Christopher's primary caregiver is his father, Ed Boone, characterised as a dedicated father who is dark-tempered. Initially, Christopher relies heavily on his father as the embodiment of morality “Loving someone is … telling them the truth, and Father [...] always tells me the truth”, so Christopher feels safe. However, Ed's temper proves to be the undoing of his association with Christopher, as he finds it caused him to kill the neighbour's dog and lie to Christopher about his mother's whereabouts. When Ed admits about his crimes to Christopher, he metaphorically refers to his temper as “when that red mist comes down …”. Ed's fierce, yet, faulty portrayal distinguishes him from the father figures usually found in such novels, yet he is a much more empathetic and credible character for him. The difference in Haddon's portrayal of Ed Boone enables him to represent interesting ideas about family units, moving away from the nuclear family's archetype, to something more gritty and realistic.
In addition to the realistic portrayal of the single-parent family unit, Haddon uses the character of Judy Boone, Christopher's mother, to depict intriguing thoughts about the differences experienced by parents of children with disabilities. Judy's narrative voice is the only other voice present in this text, apart from that of Christopher, and it is through her that we experience an alternative point of view. Judy speaks directly to the audience of the trials she faced raising Christopher through an epistolary interlude “Maybe if things had been differant, maybe if you’d been differant, I might have been better at it”. The spelling errors and simple language not only hints at Judy's working-class background but also depicts her simple yet powerful emotional conflict; she loves her son but is unable to cope with his disorder. She then goes on to describe instances where she and his father were unfit to deal with the ASD of Christopher, which she explains here 'It broke my heart, but eventually I decided it would be better for all of us if I went”. By justifying leaving her disabled son and her marriage, the audience is challenged by the unforgiving realities faced by families. The audience are also faced with a highly atypical mother figure-one who loves her son but ultimately feels insufficient as a caregiver and leaves him to seek a relationship with another man.
In conclusion, the ability of Haddon to explore everyday settings and events from the perspective of a highly unconventional narrator enables him to portray interesting ideas about the differences that exist both in the nuanced world he created and in contemporary society as a whole.
