The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime Analysis

Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, is an autobiographical murder mystery narrated from the perspective of an autistic teenager, Christopher Boone. Throughout the text, Haddon cleverly positions the audience to experience life through the perspective of one who cannot hope to grasp the subtle nuances of human interactions and societal norms. Christopher’s autism spectrum disorder (ASD) shapes not only what we the audience are able to experience, but also subverts the structural features of the text itself, thereby openly flouting the rules of conventional storytelling. In doing so, Haddon is able to explore everyday settings and events through the perspective of a highly unconventional narrator, thus allowing

In the opening chapter, it appears as though the text will follow the genre of a typical ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery by opening at the scene of the murder with short, sharp sentences designed to create tension – ‘It was 7 minutes after midnight.’ However, once it is made clear that the murder victim is a dog and the narrator relies on deadpan narrative and emoticons to communicate his story, the audience realises that this text will be anything but conventional. Throughout his murder investigation, narrator Christopher Boone applies all of the structural features of a detective novel to convey his story. He frequently uses jargon associated with the genre, such as ‘red herrings’, ‘prime suspect’ to refer to Mr. Shears, and makes frequent intertextual references to famous crime fiction novels such as The Hound of the