Lit Bit: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon is a moving story about a boy, Christopher, who finds his neighbor’s dog dead in his yard. Christopher, an avid fan of the Sherlock Holmes novels, becomes obsessed with discovering who murdered Wellington the dog.

Christopher has some sort of mental disability, probably autism, and this creates an interesting and surprisingly relatable element to the story. For example, Christopher likes to count the cars that pass, and if he sees three red ones in a row, it will be a Good Day. He doesn’t like it when people touch him, is fascinated by prime numbers and loves the color red but hates the color yellow.

While these specific things don’t apply to me, I do like when things are in order. As a child I used to walk very carefully in order to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. And I really, really hate that putrid green color.

Haddon’s novel is just one of many that I’ve read recently featuring a protagonist with an undefined mental disability. In Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie often has trouble connecting with other people, but we, as readers, have no trouble connecting with him. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close follows Oscar, an extraordinarily blunt boy who, perhaps too easily, finds plenty of adult friends in New York.

These novels are about characters who, on the surface, we shouldn’t be able to find relatable. And yet, we do. Perhaps we feel that they emphasize the most awkward, most antisocial, most bizarre parts of ourselves. Or perhaps these characters are just more vulnerable than others, than the people we know, than ourselves.

Maybe getting to know these vulnerable characters makes the climaxes of the stories that much more poignant. Because the emotions are so high for the characters — for these young boys who are unable to interpret mildly traumatic events in the same way as other people — we, the readers, are struck. The authors tug at our heartstrings until we fall in love with these fragile characters. As a result, we are all the more angry, sad, frustrated and scared when the end of the ride nears.

Christopher discovers the truth about Wellington, but everything else he learns is much more damaging than the murder of a neighbor’s dog. I might understand the true implications of what happened more than he does, but I feel the emotions just the same.