Character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Christopher  The book gives us an insight into Christopher’s emotionally simple world, challenging our ordinary perspectives of character and personality. Christopher’s unusual perspective on life is partly as a result of Asperger’s Syndrome and partly just an expression of his unique personality as a human being.  The next slides consider different aspects of his character

Emotional Detachment  He is unable to ‘read’ people’s emotions: p19: p101:  He doesn’t like being touched: p9:  He feels no desire to express affection for other people: p233

Information Overload  Christopher is proud of his powers of observation and memory p96: p174:  He can not cope with too much information, or too many questions, at once: p8: pp208 – 209:

The need for order  Order and regularity is very important to Christopher, because of the information overload p32: p174:  He has developed habits because of this need for order and regularity pp :  He always needs to know the time p1: p17:

Science and Mathematics  His love for order explains his passion for maths, which is logical and not ambiguous. He calms himself by doing maths problems p 149: p 201:  He also uses maths to explain the world to himself p 15:

Relationship with language  Hates English and metaphors: P19: p22:  Likes literal observations and ‘truth’: p4: p10:

Christopher’s Ritualistic Personality  Colours pp105 – 106  Cars p31  Rocking p4:  P258:  Mathematical formulas pp  Food touching p62

Christopher as a Detective  Solving a mystery requires at least three processes: gathering information, sifting out what is important and making connections.  Christopher is good at the first of these, but not the second: pp179 – 181:  or third: p32: p63:

Christopher as a Writer  In Christopher, Haddon has constructed a character who seems unsophisticated.  Most of his sentences are short and factual: p1:  Sometimes he writes longer sentences where a string of phrases is joined by conjunctions: p19:  These passages use language effectively to imitate the overwhelming rush of information that causes Christopher distress

Christopher as narrator  Christopher is a fallible, first person narrator.  We see other characters only through his eyes  Because he cannot understand emotions, the reader has to interpret the actions of other characters, as observed by Christopher, to understand how they are feeling.  To discuss: Is Haddon’s creation of Christopher as a narrator successful?