The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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Sympathy for the unsympathetic?
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Maybe because we wish we could be like them sometimes? Would we like to be able to not have regrets, a sense of humility, or envy,... to let our innate sense of decency, not our emotions, control our lives?
Christopher is able to form bonds just not express them nor understand "normies" methods of expressing affection. As an aspie myself i understand this about him which is part of the sweetness of the novel. It is the inability of the characters to communicate their affection that is the problem here. Does this make sense to you??
Sociopaths can demonstrate affection but they do not feel it. Aspies can feel it but can not demonstrate it.
Nora wrote: "Christopher is able to form bonds just not express them nor understand "normies" methods of expressing affection. As an aspie myself i understand this about him which is part of the sweetness of th..."Wow - what a great explanation. I have a son who, while not diagnosed with aspberger's, has many similarities and you are so right. He DOES feel affection , but it is so very difficult for him to express it.
A lot of people have a touch of aspergers. It is not a bad thing to have. The funny thing is we tend to communication amongst ourselves better than you non aspies. That is my experience. I could be wrong. ( took me years and years to figure out being wrong is not a bad thing)
Im not sure how one can sympathize with the mother, and I do not understand how Christopher is not mad at her for leaving him but can be mad at the father for killing a dog. I sympathize for the father. As someone who does not have Aspergers I appreciate Noras comments and found them helpful.
I am a fan of the show Parenthood and there is a character is the show with Aspergers, I found myself comparing the two often throughout the book.
Nora wrote: "A lot of people have a touch of aspergers. It is not a bad thing to have. The funny thing is we tend to communication amongst ourselves better than you non aspies. That is my experience. I could be..."I have to agree so much! Having two family members who are also autistic spectrum and everyone else being so used to it, once you know the rules you can communicate comfortably and without a lot of the pain nuro-typicals seem to go through with duplicity and miscommunication.
When I read the book I found Christopher to be an immensely unlikeable character, so much so that I found the entire book depressing. But when I read this article http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/mag... I began to wonder if the author had just not done a good job of portraying the reality of someone on the spectrum.
I sometimes wonder if there's not an evolutionary caretaker gene that some inherit and some do not.I'm an inveterate rescuer/caretaker. I know that I've got a soft spot for those that need some rescuing.
Other books that really tapped into that for me were:
Inside Out
Stuck in Neutral
Clear Water
Ethan, Who Loved Carter
and the recent movie
White Frog
Isn't part of autism (regardless of where you are on the spectrum) some sense of distance from everyone? Is that why Christopher's parents are so unsympathetic? They've both made some pretty profound parenting mistakes that would still be mistakes if they had a "normal" kid, but usually there would be some sort of gesture or characteristic that would counteract that whereas Christopher wouldn't be able to convey that.
Plot spoilers follow.
His parents are very hard to sympathize with after we learn of their betrayals of Christopher, and each one is like a kick in the stomach. First that his mother is unfaithful, then that his father lied about it, then that she ran away and subsituted letter writing for parenting, and then that her father lied about that and told Christopher she died, etc.
It's an increasing spiral of lies, which we know are the true harm done to Christopher that he understands, as well as a good deal of information that makes the characters unlikable, dare I say easy to hate, for those of us reading the book who DO have the ability to process emotion even though Christopher is blissfully unharmed in his own mind by things like his mother's affair.
It starts out very easy to root for Christopher early in the book, and I know I was cheering for him in the end, even if his dreams might never come true. But the moment where his father is breaking down and in need of a physical hug from his son and Christopher just doesn't even comprehend that his father is in need broke that illusion for me.
It's much easier to READ about Christopher than to be his parent. We form a rather instant relationship with him and yet the book format belies what it would be like to know Christopher in person and know that as you care for him, he'll never care for you back, it's just out of his ability. That's crushing.
By being a book, we KNOW that the characters will never know we exist, this is the case with all other books, so it's not a violation of the social contract and we don't open ourselves to be hurt in this way.
I think then that it's a master stroke of the author to make us so interested in Christopher that we can form an emotional bond with no reciprocation for a character that can't even really LOVE his own parents.
They are both just so vile, from the reader's view, and none of the other adults really shine either, save perhaps Siobhan, who is more a representative of the author-as-quasi-narrator than a character who effects the plot of the story like the parents and neighbors do. She exists, in my view, to explain why Christopher is learned enough to construct a book on his own and the times where he invokes her to explain why he has trouble with the world, it serves the purpose for the reader to understand Christopher. She's a bridge both ways, but since Christopher is fictional, it's for the reader's benefit.
Anyway, I find it a paradox that Christopher is one of the most compelling and charismatic narrators despite being emotionally closed off from us and from his surroundings. In some respects it's like the charm the readers develop for sociopaths like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and Dexter Morgan in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. While Christopher displays none of the malice, evil, or desire to harm of those two characters, he is likewise unable to form typical emotive bonds.
Why do we sympathize with these characters that can show no sympathy themselves?