Background Information
Christopher Boone is the main character of the book The Curious Incedent of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon, and this story does a great job showing the reader what the world is like through the eyes of someone with autism. The book starts in a scene that takes place in the middle of the night when Christopher finds a dog that has been stabbed with a pitch fork on his neighbor's yard and while still having blood and the pitch fork stuck in it, Christopher just picks up the dead dog and hugs it. Then the neighbor comes out and starts screaming at him and Christopher just curled up into a ball on the ground and covered his hears. This gives the reader a bit of a taste on how people with autism feel about certain things, in this case, like being screamed at. To get rid of the overwhelming screaming, Christopher just covered up his ears. Many more of these situations occur over the course of the story as the plot progresses.
Autism and Christopher
Throughout the story, there are many exemplifications of Christopher's austism, one of which being the way the book is written. The story is written in a way to make it seem as though Christopher is the one writing it, almost like he has a journal that he writes in. It is made up of chapters, but each chapter is listed not as 1,2,3,4 and so on, but in prime numbers like 2,3,5,7 and so on because this shows how his mind works mathematically. There are also random chapters that may have absoloutely nothing to do with what's been happening in the actuall plot. For example, one chapter was about his fantasies, like how he wants to go into space by himself on a small craft, or how he wants the world to be rid of everyone except kids like him. This shows how he feels about other people in the world and he even states that he doesn't understand other people, which can make him feel uncomfortable. He also becomes uncomfortable when touched by someone else and he even punches a cop just because the cop touched him. People like the cop wouldn't understand why he did such a thing, but since there is a narrator like Christopher, that helps the reader understand what was going through his mind. When Christopher enters a state of unbearable discomfort, he squeezes himself into a tight space between 2 objects, which makes him feel very calm and detached from the rest of the world, which he enjoys. Another characteristic of Christopher described in the book is his ability to photographically memorize things like maps, to the point where he can know where he's going based on an image of a map in his head based of a map he once saw and took note of. Even though Christopher must deal with autism, he still excells in other areas like math as he is in a very advanced math class and memorization, which is helpful in many situations.
Thanks to this book, readers can than gain a much better understanding of the other side of autism.