Curious Trust

Powerful, gripping, widely-loved novels are characterized by many different writing techniques. Of these techniques, one of the most effective is an author’s ability to create a character that any reader can identify with. Even if the character thinks and acts differently than the reader would, a reader’s ability to recognize human reactions and instincts in the character will help to cement the connection. In the case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, the author is faced with the difficult task of making an identifiable character out of a boy who is autistic and therefore very set apart in his way of thinking. As Haddon recounts a story through Christopher Boone’s eyes, he finds ways to emphasize the familiar human traits present in the teenager’s autistic mind through the element of trust.

Christopher’s life revolves around patterns and similarities. He trusts that life will stay the same. He trusts concepts such as math and time because they can never change. For example, when Christopher is arrested at the beginning of the novel for hitting a policeman, he is taken to jail and asked to remove is personal belongings. Christopher tells his readers, however, that when they try to take his watch, he tells them, “that I needed to keep my watch on because I needed to know exactly what time it was. And when they tried to take it off me, I screamed” (13). In strange and unfamiliar surroundings, time is the only constant the boy can trust.

Christopher likes knowing what is going to happen and how he should react. For example, he later talks about how if he sees a classmate on the ground, he checks them for signs of an epileptic attack. Christopher can place a certain level of trust in being able to identify what is wrong with a classmate and what is the appropriate reaction. Patterns, whether in math or reality, of action and reaction give Christopher a feeling of safety. He explains to the reader on page 33 that he does not believe in Heaven or God because nobody knows where Heaven or God is. He cannot see or prove either concept for himself, and therefore, he has no reason to place his trust in them.

Christopher’s father is a key character in showing just how momentous his son’s trust or lack-there-of can be. The boy has learned to trust his father’s habits. He knows his father is quick to anger, and he recognizes when to be quiet because he has made his father angry: action and reaction. In Christopher’s life, where consistency—a pattern what is going to happen every day that he can count on—is absolutely key, his father provides the most stability. For this reason, when Christopher discovers that his father has lied to him about his mother’s death, a part of his world shatters. Suddenly surrounded by the unfamiliar, the idea that his mother is alive and that he cannot trust his father, Christopher shuts down. Right after his father confesses to killing Wellington, Christopher thinks to himself, “Father had murdered Wellington. That meant he could murder me, because I couldn’t trust him, even though he had said “Trust me,” because he had told a lie about a big thing” (122). Christopher has no logical reason to think he is in any danger from his father, but his life is broken down into two categories: what he can trust and what he cannot trust. There is no middle ground. Haddon elegantly crafted situations and thought patterns up to this point to show the reader how fundamental trust is in Christopher’s life. By the time the reader reaches the scene where Christopher loses all confidence in his father, the reader has learned to understand the boy’s reaction and sudden distance from the parent.

Haddon very eloquently presents the inner workings of Christopher’s mind to the reader so that he becomes an identifiable character. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a gripping novel because as the reader gets deeper into the novel, he or she becomes able to understand Christopher’s thinking and motive-for-action as well as feel sympathetic towards the father and his struggle to regain Christopher’s precious trust. Such fundamental human concepts help to make the book one that will linger in any book-lover’s heart. (723)