The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night Time

Often, the most recognizably human characters in a story are the most recognizably flawed or inadequate characters. What I mean is that we can identify with a non-perfect character. While most of us admire or even strive to emulate a “perfect” or model character, we are not perfect and therefore do not identify with these characters. For example, I admire and try to emulate “Jack Bauer” from “24” but he is indeed perfect in every conceivable way, and I am not, so I can not possibly identify with him on his level.
We can, however, come closer to identifying with a less perfect or flawed character. Using flawed characters, an author can allow us to identify with a character or at least recognize them as fallible human beings.

In “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”, Mark Haddon uses flawed characters and their actions to contrast the relatively insignificant peculiarities of Christopher. For example, throughout the book, Christopher’s behavior seems strange or foreign or even violent within the context of normal and conventionally proper human behavior. In the context of the society in which we live, Christopher’s hiding in the luggage compartment of the train or punching the police officer for grabbing him seems unacceptable. However, when compared to the flaws of his mother or father or the other characters around him, his idiosyncrasies become harmless or meaningless and Christopher’s character becomes less threatening to conventional sensibility of the reader. The contrast between Christopher’s nature and the more “serious” mistakes or flaws of the other characters such as his father’s deceiving of Christopher or his mother’s abandoning of Christopher, combined with the deeper understanding Christopher gives us of himself and his own reasoning allows us to look past his strange behavior and compare his trivial peculiarities with our own. Using these methods, Haddon allows us to identify with Christopher through the book in a way that we might not be able to do so quickly with a similar child in real life.

Haddon also comments on human behavior by using Christopher to perceive the true unaltered actions of his characters. Haddon uses Christopher’s point of view to cut through the rationalizations of characters in the story. Christopher perceives only the action, not the rationality or excuse behind the action. For instance, Christopher focuses only upon his father’s action of killing Wellington. He does not give credence to the excuses of rationalizations of his father and therefore associates his father’s murder of the dog with the possible ability to murder human beings as well. To the conventional human mind, this connection is not necessarily apparent. Christopher views his surroundings with a lack of bias in this respect.

This viewpoint may not necessarily reflect the human condition, but it does, in my opinion, set up one of the greatest ironies in the text, the irony that Christopher comes to distrust his father, who has cared for him his entire life and been completely committed to his development, and trust his mother, who abandoned him in his developmental time of need. So in the end, after a long, convoluted path of logic and examination, we realize that even this aspect of Christopher’s character is flawed and recognizably biased. An unbiased point of view may be a foundation of our civilization (or legal system) but it is ultimately impossible for us to achieve. In this respect, we see that Christopher is still recognizably human. (573)