The effect of an autistic narrator
The main character is Christopher John Francis Boone who is an autistic fifteen-year-old boy. He hates physychal contact and he doesn’t like to talk with strangers. Christopher is very clever, he is very interested in mathemathics, and he has a photographic memory. However, he has difficulty understanding human behaviour, gestures and relationships. He is also unable to recognize and comprehend facial expressions other than ”happy” and ”sad” and he has difficulty understanding methaphors and jokes. He can’t put himself in somebody’s place, and he can’t imagine how people might feel or think in certain situations. He also hates lies, and he himself can’t tell lies, except from white ones. To protect himself against overwhelming noise or information, he curls up and groans.
For Christopher, the desire for order and stability is a necessity of living. As he suffers from Asberger’s Syndrome, he needs an orderly and stable life to be happy and safe. For instance, he can’t stand it when furniture is being moved around.
Christopher’s mood is decided by how many red or yellow cars he sees in a row.
The fact that Christopher suffers from Asberger’s Syndrome makes the novel very different from other murder novels. He sees the world in a very special way. He focuses on irrelevant details and when he gets a bit out of track, he can carry on talking about the same thing for a very long time, even though it isn’t very relevant. The novel shows that Christopher is very intelligent because it contains a lot of mathemathical problems and how to solve them.
Even though I like that this novel is different because of the way it is written, I sometimes thought that it was a bit heavy to read because of the fact that Cristopher gets caught up in a lot of things that really doesn’t interest me. But in many ways it is very exciting, because we learn a lot about how an autistic person looks at different situations and how their life can be a struggle some times. The language of this novel is, due to its narrator, quite simple. It contains many illustrations, and it is written in a naive and humourous way.
