A "Curious" Look at Society

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon offers us interesting insight into the mind of an autistic child, but possibly more importantly, Haddon’s work reminds us how completely culturally-infused we are. Characters in Haddon’s novel are forced to explain the inexplicable social norms to the autistic narrator, who, with his ever-practical understanding of the world, struggles to understand the everyday oddities of society that we take for granted.

Lacking any sort of drive for social acceptance, Christopher is able to evaluate society in a methodical way that most of us, try as we may, are often unable to do as our world becomes clouded with emotionality that leads to irrationality. This is not to say that Christopher does not feel, as the entire novel is based on Christopher’s drive to seek out the murderer of Mrs. Shears’s dog Wellington, but he has an intense and constant urge to divorce himself from society and all of the stigmas that come with connecting with other people. He tells us, for instance, about the reoccurring dream that he loves in which everyone in the world is dead but him so he is allowed to roam as he pleases.

Though Christopher’s mind is sometimes nauseatingly full of facts, there is some irrationality that keeps him more human than computer-like. Despite Christopher’s attempts to justify his distaste for yellow and brown, he knows that it does not make much sense. Christopher thinks,

“Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and brown is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn’t say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don’t know if you are going to like something because you haven’t tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you don’t like and you don’t choose these, and then it is simple” (Haddon 85).

While Christopher often seems to operate in a separate world from the rest of us, he, like us, have unreasonable tastes. Yet, like most of us, he still adheres to particular preferences over others. After this passage, Christopher goes on to list reasons for his dislike of yellow and brown. He recognizes that decisions must be made about likes and dislikes in order to move anywhere. While these tastes, like our own, are unfounded, they are inevitable. Christopher arrives at this decision, but only after careful scrutiny and evaluation of the reasons for his tastes. Here, we can take an important lesson from this seemingly-naïve soul. It is all too often that people allow themselves to maintain prejudice without making an attempt to understand the roots of their particular preferences.

Haddon gives a complex mind to an outwardly-seeming simple character that has a sense of justice and a constant yearning for understanding the social world and all its idiosyncrasies.