5/9/2023 0 Comments The dog incident at nighttime![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As he collects facts relating to the death of the dog, he unwittingly pieces together a jigsaw that reveals to the reader the lies, grief and evasions of his parents' lives. Detective fiction, relying on the accumulation of material facts, is the only fiction that makes sense to Christopher. Haddon ingeniously uses Christopher's admiration for Sherlock Holmes to lead him out of this stasis, not to effect some miraculous "cure", but so that a story can happen. Their interests are prescribed, their experiences static, their interaction with others limited. He can cope with facts, with concrete detail emotions confuse and alarm him.Īutistic people are not easy subjects for novelists. On the day he is told his mother is dead, he records his Scrabble score, and notes that supper was spaghetti with tomato sauce. Christopher sees everything, remembers everything, but cannot prioritise - cannot sift out what most of us regard as important. Haddon, rather like Daniel Keyes in his 1959 classic Flowers for Algernon, uses his narrator's innocence as a means of commenting on the emotional and moral confusion in the lives of the adults around him. Mark Haddon's study of the condition is superbly realised, but this is not simply a novel about disability. Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, though this is never specified. ![]()
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