Analysisi of Christopher Boones Personality

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Analysis of Christopher Boone’s Personality

Christopher Boone is the main character in the novel ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’. Christopher is fifteen years old and has a form of Autism called Asperger’s. Due to this condition, he has a photographic memory, is very good at science and maths, but finds it hard to understand other humans. When he discovers his neighbour’s dog lying dead on the lawn, he can not possibly leave the mystery unsolved and is determined to track down the killer. In this essay I am going to explore the personality of this quite complicated character.

One of the things that Christopher finds most difficult is understanding people’s emotions. This is one of the reason for his love of dogs, “I like dogs………it has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating.” This shows that Christopher likes dogs because they are easy for him to understand as they only have a few moods and so he isn’t confused by their emotions. We can see that he finds humans much more complicated in the quote “I could tell he was angry because he was shouting,” as this tells us that Christopher has to wait for certain signs to tell that someone is angry as he can’t understand how they are feeling by there expressions of what they are saying.

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Because of this difficulty to understand people’s emotions, Christopher is also not very good at social skills. He is afraid to ask for help from people he doesn’t know and will not go in to a neighbour’s house. He can not do ‘chatting’ as he demonstrates in his talk with Mrs Alexander. “I didn’t reply to this either because Mrs Alexander was doing what is called chatting.” This illustrates that he doesn’t understand chatting about unconnected things, but prefers questions with definite answers.

Despite the fact that he finds the above things challenging, he is incredibly talented and able when ...

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