The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

Curious Dog does has many points to comment upon.

 

Chistopher is different but not strange

Haddon presents Christopher as the hero of the story.

He is different. He assembles differently. Typically, he might be labelled as having an intellectual disability. Such people are often judged as ‘strange’. Haddon challenges this persepctive.

 

Haddon goes to great length to show that Christopher is merely different, and assembles and experiences the world in novel ways. For Christopher, a logical, factual, diagrammatic world is what he experiences and works with. And his way of understanding does take him to the point of his quest, to find out who killed the dog, a crime for which he was blamed.

 

This detective quest, unfortunately reveals for him some unsavoury facts about his past family life, revealing his mother’s abandonment of him, and an affair with the neighbour which was deeply resented by Christopher’s father.

 

Consider other characters who might be seen as ‘strange’....

 

Textual Conversations 

Sylvia Plath / Ted Hughes: Poets

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Plath was an intense, extraordinarily talented human who was hyper-sensitive to the world, to the universe in which she lived. She, like most poets, had to do battle with her muse which was like a multi-laned highway of sensory awareness and perception going in all kinds of directions that included ritual, biology, forces of nature and the supernatural, charged with the forces of life and death. These elements and more intersected in her being and she took on the herculean task, through her talent of perception, of taming them into the expression of poetry.

To add, she was acutely aware of her past, what it had and had not given her, explained by her complex relationship with her father. Hughes, was something of a bystander, a witness to this unique flame of life called Sylvia Plath but was often blamed for her demise. The ability to so completely juxtapose such intense yet delicate sensibilities, reversing, modifying, invoking then causing to disappear high voltage, bitter-sweet perceptions, was her unique talent.

The orchestra which she conducted had instruments in it which she invented and only she knew how to play.

But it came at an awful price.