Christopher Boone, the protagonist of the novel: The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night-time shows many distinct characteristics that help explain to the reader about his identity. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is faced with an introduction made by Christopher: “My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7507. ” This automatically signals that the protagonist is rather different in the way that he perceives the world as he views the statistics as just as important as his name.
Throughout the first few chapters of the novel, we learn that Christopher is extremely observant and detailed. In the way that he describes his observations, we see that his thinking is logical and honest. An example is his reaction to the murder of the dog: instead of having feelings such as shock or fear, Christopher focuses on how the dog might have died and why the garden fork was upright. We also learn that Christopher has a great capacity to remember and memorise theories and situations and that he is also very talented in the science and maths subjects.
Despite the ability to remember large amounts of statistics, Christopher struggles to process information that comes from the real world. He would often “make this noise which father calls groaning” when “too much is coming into my [his] head. ” From Christopher’s writing, we can also see that it becomes very awkward whenever there is no relation from it to the various subjects in which he takes interest. His sentences become less structured and there are many repeated words such as “said” and “then”.
The Essay on Origins of Dogs
Humans and dogs have constantly shared exceptionally strong social affections, a dependency relationship that is not normally observed in other human-animal relationships. Humans and dogs equally preferred to put their fears from each other aside in order to live reciprocally. Dogs are significant part of human history, seeing that throughout times dogs are without a doubt wonderful companions and ...
Christopher also finds communicating with others very confusing as he is not accustomed to reading and interpreting other people’s emotions. Due to Christopher’s autism, observing expressions, body language and interpreting the tone of voice or sarcasm becomes extremely difficult. This contributes to Christopher’s desire to be alone, in his own world: a world where everything can be proven and is set in an organised, logical manner. From these various characteristics, we can infer that Christopher is unusually intelligent for his age and that he has a very unique personality (due to his autism).