Cruious

Christopher Boone, the fifteen year old protagonist of Mark Haddon’s contemporary novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” (Curious Incident) finds the world a confusing place. His obsession with the truth, logic and facts is indicative of his need to impose order on this challenging world so that he can cope within it. His search for the truth of Wellington’s death, leads him to revelations which undermine many of his sureties and throw his world into chaos. However it’s his reaction to these revelations which also enables him to restore order in his life.
In the book “Curious” Mark Haddon has used an interesting narrative structure to convey the effects of Christopher Boone as the distinctive narrator. A distinctive feature we see in “Curious” is the use of Narrative Digressions. Haddon has structured this novel so that about every second chapter we see a Narrative digression which throws the story into pause and in these narrative digressions he goes into unneeded subjects such as Christopher listing all of his behavioural problems Christopher says “I used to think mother and father would get divorced” this digression had followed Ed Boone stating that he wanted to leave Swindon and live somewhere else. Christopher stating all these behavioural problems shows us his thought pattern. The pun in this digression “You are going to drive me into an early grave” is connected to the lie his father puts to him and shows us how much pressure Christopher puts to his parents.

Though he seems unsuitable narrating a novel, Haddon carefully constructs an authorial voice, thus demonstrating symptoms of his behavioural problems, ‘Asperger’s syndrome’. This is a syndrome that enables him to see the world only through his limited perspective, which is closed, frightened and disorientated - which results in his fear of, and inability to understand the perplexing world of people's emotions. His description of events can be somewhat unreliable as he is unable