No two people ever share the same world. Each person observes it through eyes tinted by a lifetime’s experience, introspection
and individual differences that might be genetic or spiritual or any one of a thousand or less other potential sources, not to mention present biological and psychological circumstance, these things alter the way that we perceive everything, every object in our environments carries implications, associations and possibilities, and two people in the same situation need not attach the same characteristics to the same surroundings. If two people look at a donut and one sees something that he can eat while the other sees something that he can have sex with, are they still looking at the same thing? Are they inhabiting the same room?
“The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time” is told from the point of view of a child with Asperger’s Syndrome, taking the reader deep inside his personal world. His condition affects the way he interprets all of the events around him, and the approaches he takes to all the problems he encounters. For example, he is unable to intuitively read the expressions of others, even those who are closest to him, instead he has been taught to recognise expressions like J happy and L sad from illustrations, complicated expressions that haven’t been taught to him he is unable to recognise. On the other hand, he’s very good at maths, and very perceptive, noticing and remembering even the most trivial details in his surroundings. Also, he has no imagination. I don’t mean that in the usual, derogatory way that it might be said about boring people, I mean that he literally has no imagination. He can’t lie, and is disturbed by them when they’re told by other people, but lying is often a part of everyday life, we’ll quite happily tell awful cooks that their food is yummy if we’re confident we can get out of eating it again, we tell people we’re glad to see them when we’d like to hack their livers out with a Phillip’s Screwdriver, and we tell ourselves that things are going to be okay, we’re going to put the world to rights tomorrow and that we aren’t ever going to have to get old or die. Christopher’s inability to lie immediately puts him at a distance from the rest of the world, he plays by a different set of rules and the game can get rather messy as a result.
The book’s a good opportunity to see the world through another person’s eyes for a little while. Any experience that turns reality upside down for a few hours has to be worthwhile.