In “the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, the author Mark Haddon presents a series detective stories of a autistic boy of 15 year-old named Christopher Boone, living in Swindon, England to investigate the death of a dog called wellington and finds the secret of his family and venture across London. As my first sight of the character Christopher, I just got the impact of his suffering of autistic issue and took pity on him. He was in a special-needs school and stuck in a stereotypical discrimination from outside.
For example, when he got off the school bus, he was joked as “Special Needs! Special Needs! ” (Haddon 44) and became the derision for fun by others of the same age. On the other hand, he had less predictable mind than most ordinary people, especially in terms of the insufficient to conjecture the facial expression, and he also could not talk to people in “normal” social etiquette.
It generated a communication obstacle among him and other people. His random spasms or behavioral habits had a tendency to scare strangers.
Therefore, people got quickly irritated and walked away. This was seen on his journey to London when he met a woman of good intension to help him. The lady tried to see if he was alright and asked “is there anything I can do for you”. Instead of typically replying a “yes” or “no”, he threatened the lady, “I’ve got a Swiss army knife and it has a saw blade…finger off” (Haddon 184).
Even facing his mother, who might count as strangers, Christopher had difficulty to go shopping and understood what her mother implied.
After he lived with her mother temporally, he said he had “one of his favorite dreams”, where there would be only him left and he needn’t struggle in the social communication. With further reading, I thought I could not use “disability” to describe his communication, but “difference” instead. Thought he did not communicate with some strangers, one person who did was Siobhan, his teacher. As a professional, Siobhan was able to understand and respect Christopher, a detail at the beginning of the novel, she apologizing to Christopher for her picture and her laughing (Haddon 3).
She understood that Christopher needed very specific details when being told what to do and it would confuse him if they were not put in a particular way. For example, she said “If you want to go on the swings and there are already people on the swings, you must never push them off. You must ask…have finished” (Haddon 30) instead of “you must obey the order and be polite”, which Christopher would never be able to interpret so that he ould decide for himself “what I am going to do and what I am not going to do” (30). There was a trust helped Siobhan and Christopher to communicate. However, even though Siobhan was able to understand Christopher at a high level, she cannot form a close bond with him and lacks an insight to him that others who weren’t emotionally detached to him could see. Although his father did not have too much talk with Christopher, he was the core of the life of Christopher.
The Curious Incident Essay. (2019, Nov 27). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-communication-in-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-night-time-3609/