Curious Incident of the Dog

Year 10 English

Responding To Texts Practice Essay Two

Topic: “The problems in the story occur because of poor communication and a lack of understanding about other people’s needs.” Do you agree?

In Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” the main character, Christopher Boone has an autistic condition, Asperger’s Disease thus having the difficulty communicating and understanding other adults and children around him and this causes many problems throughout the whole story not only with his care taker Siobhan but also amongst his family.

Christopher can’t communicate with any other people; he can’t at all connect with any other people, or read their feelings. His people reading skills are so poor that he asked his care worker Siobhan, to write up a table of human faces with a caption of what the people are feeling. Boone ‘kept this piece of paper in his pocket and took it out when he didn’t understand what someone was saying. But it was difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the face they were making because people’s faces move very quickly.’ For an average 15 year old the most important part of their existence is their social life. Christopher however place no emphasis becoming a better socialist in fact he seems aware of, and content with what we as the reader believe to be an impairment, ‘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.’ He doesn’t worry about his issues mainly because his mind doesn’t allow him to empathise with himself and his problems or others.

Christopher finds communication and social relations difficult. He is a social outsider, with eccentric modes of thought and