The Sad Mind of Christopher Boone

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

For me, Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, is most importantly a means for its readers to connect with and truly understand its protagonist, Christopher Boone, who suffers from a mental deficiency. In my life I have never personally known anyone suffering from similar mental deficiencies, and when I have seen these people from afar, I have never felt like I can relate to them, because I have never understood the inner workings of their minds. However, since this novel is mostly dedicated to depicting the inner workings of the mind of Christopher Boone, for the first time I felt as if I could understand him because I knew how he thought.
The more I came to understand Boone, though, the worse I felt for him. This is an individual who lives his entire life through nothing but solid, unarguable logic. Perhaps it is this logic that first enabled me to feel connected with this character, since a large part of my mind works in the same manner. And while this logical part of my mind has enabled me to perform well in school, problem solve, and maintain my sanity at times when I feel as if most of my friends have lost theirs, it has never brought me true happiness.
What has brought me true happiness is the instinctive and emotional parts of who I am: what my gut and my heart tell me. This past summer I spent a month at Mount Hood in northern Oregon as a camper and a worker at a summer ski camp. During this time I virtually shut down the logical part of who I am and ran off my instinct and emotions. The conditions there were by no means exceptional; I lived out of a trailer with nine other workers, worked obscure hours washing dishes for nothing more than room and board, and often had to hike uphill just to ski downhill. Still, it was the best time I have ever had and the first time I had been content with my life in the proceeding five months. I loved what I was doing and whom I was there with, and it did not take any logic to appreciate that. My instinct and emotions told me it was right.
By the time I had finished Haddon’s novel, I could not have cared less about the plot because I felt so terrible for Christopher. Even though he is only a made up character, he would never know this truest of happiness because his mind would never separate from the cold, solid logic on which it was built. He can name all the capitols in the world and run numbers like a computer, but he cannot lie, understand figures of speech, or bear to be touched by another human being. He is missing that element which enables the rest of us to experience the human condition. (511)