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Influence Of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a mystery work of fiction by a British writer Mark Haddon, who was born on the 26th of September in Northampton, England in 1962, where he was brought up by an architect. Mark Haddon was educated at Uppingham School he then went on to his English Literature major at Oxford, Merton College. After completing his studies, he went to Scotland where he spent his time working with MENCAP which was an organisation that helped disabled people, this experience of looking after individuals who were diagnosed with autism and various sclerosis soon influenced him with his fictional writing. Having an interest in mental and physical health issues it encouraged Mark Haddon to start seeing the commonalities …show more content…

The curious incident of a dog in the night time is an adult novel which tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy called Christopher Boone, who discovers that his neighbour’s dog is dead. He did some detective work to solve the mystery of who killed the dog, as he was a fan of Sherlock homes stories, as the story unfolds he finds out a lot more than he thought, regarding himself and parts of the world he did not know existed. Mark Haddon gained influence from Jane Austen who wrote about dull lives of individuals with empathy that seemed somewhat intriguing, he mentions that he was trying to do this exactly with the novel the curious incident of the dog. By taking a life which seemed unpleasantly guarded, and to write about it in a book, where the male protagonist would read a mystery murder and show that if you looked at life with enough imagination it would seem endless (Haddon, …show more content…

Some of the characteristics of those who have autism consist of repetitive thinking and compulsive attention in things like symbols, languages and numbers. The cause of autism is not yet known as of now, however, many people consider it a genetic disorder which takes place at birth. Christopher Boone has one specific form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome, his disorder is reflected through his fascination with mathematics, detail, astronomy and colours; his thoughts on routine and violent hatred to interaction, even though it is not specified in the book. In 1943 Leo Kanner a psychiatrist published a paper surrounded around the research of 11 young patients that fit into a fine variety of diagnostic principles that he measured out to be autistic. During Kanner’s career he has seen fewer than 150 cases that go with the description he came up with of the syndrome, he theorised that autism was very unsupported and rare. Autism turned out to be a foundation of embarrassment and several of those who were diagnosed were certified; in the 1970s everything started to change (Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Simons Foundation, n.d.). Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner both used the word autism, in the 1940s when they were doing

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