The curious incident of the dog in the night time

Filling the Gaps: Secondary Characters as Sources of Information in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Haddon narrates the story of Christopher, a boy with Asperger Disorder who tries to solve the case of Wellington. Due to the condition Christopher presents, the narrative is very distinctive in the sense that thenarrator leaves aside emotions most of the times. Therefore the reader needs to play an active role in filling the gaps the narrative presents. Secondary characters, thus, act as sources that provide new information that does not only help the reader to fill these gaps but also present new perspectives and points of view.
Narration in Haddon’s novel is peculiar because the narrator andprimary source of information cannot interact normally with the rest of the characters. The fact that Christopher has Asperger syndrome modifies the whole narration, i.e the reader is confronted to a frst person narrator that does not make any inference of other people’s intentions and only makes an account of the ‘superficial’ behavior ( FrieBmann,398).
According to FrieBmann, Christopher is“mindblind”. This concept was coined by Baron-Cohen in 1995, to depict the difficulties that an autistic person presents when interacting. This lack of social skills would be explained by a deficit in their theory of the mind, in which explains people’s ability of understanding intentions, intuiting or being able to empathize with others. Christopher clearly presents a deficit in his theory ofmind because in the beginning of the narrative it is clear that he has problems with people, for he finds them confusing. He points out that “I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating.” (Haddon,4). By stating this, Christopher reveals that he does not really like people because, unlike dogs, they have more than four moods, bodylanguage he cannot interpret and he also presents difficulty understanding jokes, metaphors and lies. Thus interacting with society for Christopher can constitute a stressing event, he becomes puzzled by people’s actions or sayings and his fixed logical brain cannot comprehend beyond the superficial.
The idea of Christopher being an unreliable narrator can appear. This idea is comprehensible inthe sense that clearly Christopher narration is conditioned by his problem, and is not able to give insights to peoples feelings or emotions. To this, FrieBmann, responds that it is not that Christopher is unreliable as a narrator but limited. He tells the truth but his vision and understanding of the events is limited when compared to others. “ There is a sharp discrepancy between how Christopherhimself experiences, interprets and describes events and how the other characters in the novel experience and interpret the same events.” ( FrieBmann, 396). Therefore Christopher represents a limited narrator because of his condition. He cannot trespass the barrier of the subtleties of language and stays embedded only in the literal part of meaning. Lambidoni, in her essay “Life Viewed throughthe Eyes of a Child with Autism”, points out that communication is a “two-way street”, thus, in the novel is not only Christopher that is not able to understand people but also the rest of his community that is not able to understand him. To this she adds; “Christopher does struggle with understanding the fine distinctions in social interaction, but people in contact with him also frequentlymisinterpret his
actions or fail to decode his intentions.” ( Lambidoni, 95). This is shown in the incident with Wellington, when he was hugging the dead dog but Mrs. Sheers accused him of having killed her dog. This leads to the idea that if the people that surrounds Christopher knew him better they will know that the idea of him being Wellington’s murderer is not possible. Thus the failure in...