The curious incident of the dog in the night-time response post

In “The curious incident of the dog in the night-time”, Mark Haddon, the author shows us the struggles of an autistic person as they attempt to move through life with the rest of us.  Christopher, the protagonist of the novel faces many problems, all revolving around the fact that he doesn’t function mentally as others do.  This affects his social life, his academic life, and his family life.  One significant thing I noticed right away when I began reading this strange novel is the fact that whenever Christopher meets someone new, he puts extra emphasis into the description of people’s feet or shoes, and completely skips describing peoples faces.  This is because, as he states in the story, he doesn’t trust strangers.  He doesn’t trust them because they can lie, and the slight possibility that someone would lie to Christopher is too much for him to handle.  This is why he avoids people’s faces.  He can’t tell what people’s expressions are, so for example, if someone were being sarcastic, he wouldn’t be able to tell, he would think they are being serious and believe that they were lying.  People’s faces confuse Christopher even more then people are confused by Christopher.   Christopher was talking to Siobhan in the beginning of the story and she said that things that he did make people confused.  Christopher got mad because of this.  He was mad because he was just as confused as others and not even Siobhan seemed to realize this.  Something that I find very significant in this book is the intelligence of Christopher.  He doesn’t learn from finding simple facts and connecting them to find a completely new piece of information.  Because of this he has to learn everything from facts.  He is very good at science and math because both subjects are a large collection of facts, just like Christopher’s mind.  Christopher’s autism not only limits him when reading other people’s expressions, it also limits him on having emotions.  Christopher never seems to be able to express how he feels, and instead of expressing feelings in words, he screams or groans.  His own limit of emotion is so small, that he doesn’t even feel bad when he finds that his mom cheated on his dad with Mr. Shears.