English Traffic Light Curious Incident Essay

Mark Haddon uses Christopher’s explanation of his confusion to create sympathy for Christopher throughout the book. Christopher is a 15 year old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome. Christopher is extremely intelligent when it comes to maths and science. However, in the common cases of communicating normally, he struggles. He rejects being touched, and when he has absorbed too much information, he can’t handle it; he crouches on the floor and groans. His life is not a normal one; he goes to a special school, has no one he talks to who is of the same age, follows a strict timetable and lives alone with his father. This thing that Haddon has included creates endless sympathy for Christopher. In Chapter 29, Christopher reveals and justifies why he hates metaphors. He thinks that metaphors ‘should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. ’ This is an example of how Christopher doesn’t think like other people. This makes you have sympathy for him because he doesn’t understand that metaphors are used for; making things more interesting, to make more sense of things by finding similarities. In addition, Christopher’s tone, narrative voice, also contributes to the sympathy for Christopher. The very easy and comprehensible language uses makes you understand how he thinks; ‘And then it started to rain and I got wet and I started shivering because I was cold. And then it was 11:32 p. m. and I heard voices of people walking along the street. ’ After each chapter in the book, which go up in prime numbers, with parts of the actual story, Christopher tends to babble on about memories, calculations and ideas, which sometimes can be slightly boring. Nonetheless; they show how Christopher thinks. This makes you feel sympathy for him because he clearly finds it difficult to focus on one thing; ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles is my favourite book. ’ And it shows that he can only understand maths and science because that’s mainly what he always talks about. Furthermore, the way Christopher expresses his love for his father is different from the usual hug; ‘He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out I a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people, so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me. ’ This makes you feel sympathy for him because he can’t spread simple signs and messages to communicate love to people in the same way you’d expect or would find normal. Moreover, he has a strict routine timetable which is unlike others; (pg 192) To add to it, he finds it hard to distinguish between a smiling face and a crying one. (pg2)