The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Christopher loves knowledge, but he has trouble reading human faces. Eight years earlier, he met Siobhan, a tutor, who drew a series of simple faces on a sheet of paper, naming each face for its emotion. The sad one is how Christopher feels when he sees the dead dog.

Christopher kept the face sheet for reference when he didn’t understand someone. Siobhan suggested that this would make people feel awkward, so Christopher tore up the sheet, and now he simply asks people what they mean, “or I walk away” (3). 

Christopher loves dogs. They have simple moods and are easy to understand. He pulls the fork from the dog, lifts its body, and hugs it. Blood gets everywhere. Mrs. Shears runs toward him, angrily shouting, and she orders him to set the dog down. She thinks he harmed the creature. Christopher curls up on the lawn, his forehead on the grass.

Christopher reads books about science and math. Most novels mystify him, so he avoids them, except for murder mysteries. Christopher is writing this book about the dog as a “murder mystery novel” (5). Siobhan says people are interested in murders of other people, not dogs, but Christopher wants to write about what he knows, and he doesn’t know any murdered humans. Also, he likes dogs, and sometimes he prefers them to people. 

Two police constables, a man and a woman, arrive at Mrs. Shears’s house. The policewoman takes Mrs. Shears back inside her house; the policeman questions Christopher, asking if he killed the dog. Christopher says no. The policeman asks a rapid-fire series of questions; feeling overloaded, Christopher again curls up on the lawn. The policeman tries to pull him to his feet; Christopher hits him. 

Christopher doesn’t like jokes; he doesn’t get them. This book therefore won’t be funny. His father told a joke: “His face was drawn but the curtains were real” (8). Christopher understands that the word “drawn” has multiple meanings but trying to understand them in the context of the joke feels painfully like three people talking at once. 

The policeman arrests Christopher, which calms the boy, and places him in the police car. On the way to the station, Christopher looks out the window at the night sky and thinks about the Milky Way and how it’s simply the thick part of our galaxy’s disk. He includes a diagram in the text.

He also muses on how the sky at night is dark, despite all the stars in the universe, because of the expansion of space after the Big Bang. Someday, the universe will stop expanding and begin to contract, falling back inward until all that starlight will make the sky brilliantly bright, and then the heat will kill everything. 

Christopher likes prime numbers because they’re simple and can’t be divided by other numbers, so he uses them as chapter numbers—“2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on” (11). He includes diagrams showing how prime numbers can be found by removing all numbers that are divisible by smaller numbers. This can be hard to do with very large numbers. The simple rules for primes remind Christopher of life, which also has rules impossible to figure out completely. 

At the station, the police have Christopher empty his pockets. He pulls out seven items: a Swiss Army knife, some string, a puzzle piece, kibble for his pet rat, £1.47 in change, a paper clip, and a door key. They try to take his watch, but he needs to know the exact time and he screams, so they let him keep it. The police ask about his family, and he recites a list of them; they also obtain his father’s phone numbers.

They put Christopher into a cell. He likes it, noting the details, including that it’s a two-meter “perfect cube” that contains eight cubic feet of air. He wonders how he’d escape if he were in a story, concluding that he’d focus sunlight from the window through his glasses onto a piece of his clothing to set it on fire, then escape after the police pull him from the cell.

People confuse Christopher. Their facial expressions can mean many different things, which he finds “too complicated to work out in a few seconds”; they also use metaphors like “I laughed my socks off” (15), which sounds like lying. Besides, it’s hard to imagine an apple in the eye of someone you like.

His name is a metaphor that means “carrying Christ”. His mother says it comes from a Bible story about being “kind and helpful,” but Christopher just wants his name “to mean me” (16).

Christopher’s father arrives at the police station and shouts angrily to see his son. The police place them in a visiting room, where an inspector explains to Christopher that he mustn’t strike a policeman, even if he doesn’t mean to hurt him, and that if he does so again, it’ll be taken very seriously. The police release Christopher, who receives a plastic bag containing all seven of his pocket items, and he drives home with his father. 

Lying isn’t possible for Chris, not because he’s a good person but because all the possible alternatives to the truth make him feel hopelessly confused and insecure. Thus, this story is entirely the truth. 

As they drive home, Christopher’s father tells him to stay out of other people’s business. Christopher replies that he is going to find out who killed the dog; his father strikes the steering wheel and shouts, so Christopher knows he’s angry and decides to be silent.

Back home, Christopher goes upstairs to his room, feeds Toby, his pet rat, and plays Minesweeper on his computer. He goes downstairs for a soda and finds his father watching TV, tears in his eyes, drinking whisky. Christopher asks if he’s sad about Wellington, and his father says, “Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that” (21).