"The Curious Incident" Essay

Essay of “The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time”

Question:

What are the big ideas in the novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time?

20 marks.

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In the exceptional narrative, “The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time”, Mark Haddon depicts many distinctive features that orientate around the impact of Asperger’s, the need for order and stability and the significance of having relationships and family. Although the storyteller doesn’t specify the protagonist having Asperger’s syndrome, it can be postulated that the main character is on the Asperger’s scale. Therefore knowing this, it is important that readers trying to understand the text put it in perspective of being inside Christopher’s mind. Moreover, the conception of order, stability and relationships that develops in the text are clever, in that they come out of the main theme of Asperger’s and come in the form of behavioural and social frameworks. Through the use of powerful techniques such as narrative, descriptive and figurative language, Mark Haddon’s text becomes complex, and truly exemplifies the ramifications of Asperger’s syndrome on an individual.

As mentioned previously, the ramifications of Asperger’s syndrome is a distinctive quality that is explored in Haddon’s novel. The protagonist Christopher is portrayed as a person with Asperger’s Syndrome and through the opening pages, Christopher says “I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up with my forehead pressed onto the grass”. The use of stream of consciousness here, as seen especially through the heavy use of conjunctions (especially the word ‘And’) as well as the extensively detailed description of the action-taking place, puts us inside the mind of a young man who struggles with the way in which his mind works. The context surrounding this quote occurs at a moment when...

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