At one point he admits “I didn’t understand about other people having minds.” That may seem like the kind of bizarre statement that only someone suffering from a brain disorder like autism could make. There is no simple formula for using just the facts of someone’s life to figure out what’s really going on inside their mind.Ĭhristopher almost seems to intuitively realize this.

But, as Christopher observes, “the rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be.” For Christopher, this is merely mathematical fact and any interpretation will be equally applied to math, but the reader can interpret that what is true for prime numbers is also true for people. What eventually adds up into a great big pile of brutally honest factual statements by Christopher should by all accounts have the effect of making it incredibly easy to understand him. Christopher Boone at one point observes that “the mind is just a complicated machine.” The book is full of declarative observations of facts or opinions like this, but this assertion is one of the few times that he makes an attempt at interpreting what is a fact to him. Point of view is everything in the novel. The real lesson that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time seems to aiming for is that facts detached from interpretation do not equal truth. Today, it is easy to interpret the condition as autism or Asperger’s. If The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time had been written twenty years ago, the interpretation of the narrator’s unnamed “behavioral condition” might have been interpreted as retardation or even mild schizophrenia.

The facts of Sherlock Holmes remains unchanged it is the interpretation that has changed.

In light of its relation to Haddon’s novel, it is interesting to note that the character of Sherlock Holmes has moved from being seen merely as a emotionless, robotic calculating machine into, as one very famous recent TV show described him, a high-functioning sociopath. Baker Street’s most famous resident deduces who committed the crime in this particular story by interpreting a clue in a much different way than normal: the mystery gets solved not on account of a what a dog did do but rather on account of what did not do: bark. The title of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a reference to a famous Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Conan Arthur Doyle.

The night of the curious dog