The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“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 7,057.” 

Christopher introduces himself with a sampling of his knowledge; this signals that information and its acquisition are his chief concerns. Knowledge and reasoning define him. His interest in prime numbers reflects in the book’s structure. 

“I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.” 

He doesn’t much care for people, but Christopher likes animals, especially dogs and his pet rat, Toby. Animals are simple; they don’t have complicated faces or say complex things that he doesn’t understand. Thus, his autism isn’t an issue for animal friends. 

“This is a murder mystery novel. Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths.”

Mentally challenging projects intrigue Christopher. He intends simply to write about his attempt to solve a mystery, not knowing that the journal he keeps will detail an amazing and sometimes painful journey, as well as his immense growth as a person. 

“I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.”

It’s extremely hard for Christopher to deal with other people, especially when they make angry demands of him. He has tried to help with the case of the murdered dog, but the owner and a policeman suspect that he is the culprit, and they don’t understand his way of communicating and his unusual way of relating to others, so they press him beyond his capacity. He does the only thing he knows how to do in these situations, curling up in a ball and moaning to drown out the chaos in his head. 

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.” 

The rules for finding prime numbers are simple, but applying them can be fiendishly hard. Like math, life contains some rules that are simple but generate infinite variations. The variations can be daunting and intimidating, but the simple rules reassure Christopher.  

“Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can mean lots of different things. It can mean ‘I want to do sex with you’ and it can also mean ‘I think that what you just said was very stupid.’” 

Christopher struggles to understand the fast-paced changes in people’s facial expressions; he also feels confused by metaphors, which sound to him like lies. 

“Father was standing in the corridor. He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.” 

A hug can overwhelm someone with autism; Christopher’s parents have met him halfway with the finger-touch gesture. He needs his parents very much, but this is as close as he’s able and willing to get with them or anyone. 

“I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can’t tell lies.” 

Things that are true reassure Christopher; lies confuse and upset him. This, along with his nearly perfect recall, make him extremely accurate and reliable in conversation. It also makes him vulnerable in situations where misleading others might help him avoid danger. 

“I don’t like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn’t happen and they make me feel shaky and scared. And this is why everything I have written here is true.”

The world can be a frightening place for Christopher, with its whirl of people who communicate partly through facial expressions he can’t decipher and with metaphors that confuse him. Truth feels like safety, but fiction upends that safety by introducing things and events that aren’t real, which tears holes in Christopher’s sense of a world he can understand. 

“Usually people look at you when they’re talking to you. I know that they’re working out what I’m thinking, but I can’t tell what they’re thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.” 

Even as he struggles to decipher facial expressions, Christopher’s own face betrays his feelings to others. He’s usually at a disadvantage when communicating with others, as if he’s being spied on by the person he’s talking to. 

“I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. And I said that some people who worked in an office came out of their house in the morning and saw that the sun was shining and it made them feel happy, or they saw that it was raining and it made them feel sad, but the only difference was the weather and if they worked in an office the weather didn’t have anything to do with whether they had a good day or a bad day.” 

Not just Christopher but nearly everyone likes some things to be in good order. If there’s no source of order, sometimes people make up an order just to simplify their decisions. Christopher is well aware that he, too, creates arbitrary ways of ordering his experience. 

“Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn’t ask at the crematorium because I didn’t go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.” 

Christopher doesn’t believe in God or Heaven or an afterlife; he thinks that, when creatures die, their bodies break down into molecules that become part of the dirt and the flowers and trees that grow there. The smoke from his mother’s cremation may put her molecules all over the Earth. The idea of her ashes wandering the planet gives Christopher a comforting sense that his mother somehow still is here, even if it’s only her atoms. 

“I used to think that Mother and Father might get divorced. That was because they had lots of arguments and sometimes they hated each other. This was because of the stress of looking after someone who has Behavioral Problems like I have. I used to have lots of Behavioral Problems, but I don’t have so many now because I’m more grown up and I can make decisions for myself and do things on my own like going out of the house and buying things at the shop at the end of the road.” 

Autism generates numerous behavioral traits that can cause stressors in relationships with others. Christopher is correct that he has, with his parents’ help, learned coping mechanisms that minimize conflicts between himself and the people in his life. Many snags still remain, though, and Christopher must reckon with them as he investigates the mystery of Wellington’s death and searches for his mother. 

“Mr. Jeavons said that I liked maths because it was safe. He said I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end. And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers at the end. I know he meant this because this is what he said.” 

Christopher believes math also can be messy, but Mr. Jeavons is correct that math is more orderly and controllable than life, and that this might appeal to someone who prefers logic and attainable truth to the uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos of other people. 

“I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mystery and he says The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. But he notices them, like I do.” 

Christopher identifies with Sherlock Holmes for his orderly, logical mind and his ability to observe details in his surroundings that help him understand other people. Lacking the ability to read faces, Christopher focuses instead on other details—what people are wearing, the things they say, the objects in their possession—that might serve as clues he can use to solve the mystery of what they’re thinking.

“My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people were wearing, and what they smelled like, because my memory has a smelltrack which is like a soundtrack. […] For example, I could Rewind to 4 July 1992 when I was 9 years old, which was a Saturday, and we were on holiday in Cornwall and in the afternoon we were on the beach in a place called Polperro. And Mother was wearing a pair of shorts made out of denim and a light blue bikini top and she was smoking cigarettes called Consulate which were mint flavor. And she wasn’t swimming. Mother was sunbathing on a towel which had red and purple stripes and she was reading a book by Georgette Heyer called The Masqueraders.” 

Christopher has a photographic, or eidetic, memory that enables him to recall virtually anything from his past. This often occurs in people with Autism, who sometimes calm themselves by making detailed mental lists of things in their environment, which contributes to their prodigious memories. Christopher’s eye for detail, which soothes his anxieties, also helps him in his detecting. 

“Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.” 

Because his mind is relentlessly scientific, Christopher believes that mysterious things that seem supernatural ultimately get explained by reason. What many people struggle to accept—that mysterious phenomena aren’t evidence of an alternate reality but simple artifacts of physical law—Christopher comes by naturally. 

“[…] [W]hen I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds. And Julie said to Mother and Father that I would always find this very difficult. But I don’t find this difficult now. Because I decided that it was a kind of puzzle, and if something is a puzzle there is always a way of solving it.” 

Christopher has trouble imagining what other people might be thinking, in part because he can’t read facial expressions, and partly because his way of thinking is analytical and non-intuitive. He knows that other people sense and feel and think, but what they see and imagine are in many ways as mysterious to him as his way of seeing the world mystifies others. 

“And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.”

One of Christopher’s many techniques for calming himself is to gaze up at the sky, with its ever-changing clouds and nighttime of stars, things that make him feel tiny by comparison. When he sees his problems as rounding errors in the grand scheme, he relaxes, believing for a while that it’s the big things that matter, not his little human worries. 

“And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.” 

Christopher notices everything, so when he’s in a new place or one that’s crowded with people, his mind gets overloaded and he has to curl up, calm himself, and try to start over. This sensory sensitivity is common in autistic people. 

“And that is why I am good at chess and maths and logic, because most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like, ‘I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.’” 

Christopher’s mind works in a very focused manner, taking one thing at a time and examining it carefully. This gives Christopher an advantage over other people, who tend to process their environment in quick and simple ways that overlook the details that Christopher can use to solve problems. The author is setting up Christopher’s unique abilities to solve the story’s mysteries. 

“Siobhan says people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn’t make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles.” 

Crowds and new places give Christopher dread. He’d much rather stay home doing science projects and reading about the world, learning things one at a time instead of all at once in a terrifying rush. 

“[…] I had one of my favorite dreams. […] And in the dream nearly everyone on the earth is dead, because they have caught a virus. But it’s not like a normal virus. It’s like a computer virus. And people catch it because of the meaning of something an infected person says and the meaning of what they do with their faces when they say it, which means that people can also get it from watching an infected person on television, which means that it spreads around the world really quickly. And when people get the virus they just sit on the sofa and do nothing and they don’t eat or drink and so they die.” 

It’s very hard for Christopher to deal with people, and he would just as soon have a world without them. The dream also occurs to him during the day as a fantasy. Part of him wants people to leave him alone so he can focus on what interests him—science, the natural world, books, math, and his pet rat Toby.