Looking At Our Books Through a Lens of Justice and Fairness. The Incident of the Dog in the Night-time By: Mark Haddon. Tanzim Ahmed

The question that I asked myself after reading forty-nine pages of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was: what really hard things are happening in this text? To find the answer to this question I didn’t have to read for very long. Christopher, a boy with a mental issue, wants to find out who killed his neighbor’s dog. The night of the murder, the police found him hugging the dog. They arrested him for assaulting a cop because he punched the officer. Christopher doesn’t like to be touched and when the officer put his hand on him, Christopher let it fly. After being released he obtained a curiosity to find out who killed the dog.

            The tough issue that is going on in the book right now is the way people treat Christopher. Some kids at his school call him stupid or a moron. They think just because he is different from them he is stupid. This is totally incorrect because Christopher is the smartest kid in his school. He wants to grow up and get a degree in math or physics or even both. In his school there is a thing called Level A math. No one in his school ever did this type of math at the age fifteen and Christopher wants to take on the challenge. But the principal of his school won’t let him be in that class because she thinks that he can’t handle it and that he can’t be left alone. This is very tough and this is what happens in real life. People assume a person with a disability can’t do something because they are different. They should at least give the disabled person a chance before denying them. This is what is happening in the book and in the outside world. Everybody deserves a chance, at least one.