Christopher Boone Use Prime Numbers In The Curious Incident Of The Dog At Night

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“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” is a combination of many styles of story including elements of a detective story, fiction, some comedy moments and a large portion of drama, it also touches on many different themes mainly on family, belonging disability, overcoming adversity, marital stress and the pressures of modern living. The story is told from the perspective of a young boy named Christopher John Francis Boone who has the psychological condition Asperger’s syndrome. The novel follows Christopher’s exploration into the murder of his neighbour’s dog, which uncovers inconvenient truths about his family including the death of his mother and the real identity of the dog’s killer. Through Christopher’s investigation we see …show more content…

In the book Christopher said “I have decided to give my chapter’s prime numbers 2, 3,5,7,11,13 and so on because I like prime numbers.” Christopher then continues on to say “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” this quote presents the symbolism that the prime numbers carry which alludes to Christopher’s problem with following peoples non-specific instructions as he quotes in the story “when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense. For example, people often say ‘be quiet’ but they don’t tell you how long to be quiet for.” this quote really gives you a look into the fastidious nature of Christopher, he needs to have every detail explained to him for him to follow instructions. Therefore through the use of prime numbers as chapters and looking into the symbolism the audience gets a view of Christopher’s nature and how he …show more content…

This technique is used primarily to express Christopher’s ideas whether that is his maths problems or the signs that he sees in London. When Christopher gets worried or scared such as in his big trip to London the frequency of the math problems, diagrams and maps skyrockets, this is deliberately done by Haddon to give a sense of Christopher trying to stay detached from his problems, a prime example of this is this is when Christopher makes his way to Swindon Station, after he had walked through the station tunnel he immediately goes into a maths problem called Conway’s Soldiers and goes into great detail about how it works taking up three pages of the book to explain this to the audience and distract himself from what scares him. Therefore through Haddon’s use of maps, graphics and math problems throughout the story the audience is able to have a greater insight into Christopher’s character and gives us a superior understanding of Christopher’s mental

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