Christopher

In some respects, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a character study more than a novel. Fifteen-year-old Christopher, the autistic genius who narrates the book, is the center of everything. The gist of the novel is more about peeking inside a unique mind than it is about solving the mystery of who killed a dog. Christopher’s life is about absolutes, logic and truth. When he discovers the dead dog, Wellington, a standard poodle, he decides to write a book about his efforts to solve the murder. Christopher is incapable of lying, which makes him an unlikely narrator for a fictional work, but within his narration, the fictional character Christopher speaks only the truth. The truth that Christopher speaks is as revealing of the foibles of normal people as it is of the internal workings of an autistic child’s mind.

Christopher attends a...