Second Group Discussion: the curious incident of the dog in the night-time

There were many interesting things that was said in our second group discussion about "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" by mark haddon on Friday. One thing that our group talked about was how Christopher felt after reading the letters that revealed that his mother was still alive and that his dad lied to him this whole time. We thought this was an interesting topic to talk about because since Christopher have Autism, the way how he react to these letters would be very different from what a normal person would react. One person in our group also brought up the question about if Christopher was giving out any emotion of sadness or anger during the moments after he finished reading.

In a way, I felt that Christopher seemed really emotionless but just don't know how to express it after he reading the letters. This is how he responded to his father, after his father was trying to plead for forgiveness after realizing Christopher has found the letters that he tried to hid from him:

"And I didn't scream. And I didn't fight. And I didn't hit him." (page 115)

This action of emptiness from Christopher really emphasize the fact that something inside of him has been broken into pieces of hollowness, and just have no idea how to express it in the outside. We mentioned in our first group discussion of Christopher having Autism made him hard to distinguish people's emotion seemed to also reflect to not being able to express emotions himself either. The way how he reacted to the letters prove this.

Another interesting thing that my group talked about was the way how Christopher's brain work. Although we talked about this a lot already in our first group discussion, we dug into it even more in this discussion. The reason why we kept going back to this topic is probably because of how unique his brain really is and the fact that it had really impacted the story thus far. Many things about Christopher's brain were revealed in the second part of the book. We learned that his brain worked like a film:

"And when people ask me to remember something I can just simple press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause..." (page 76)

This really showed how amazing and abnormal his brain worked compared to other people's. In conclusion, this discussion went pretty well and it helped me gain many new insights on Christopher's characters overall.