LeManley Gishie

The fundamental human qualities that are important to me are emotion and intelligence or rational. In the book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, we can see the characteristics of my fundamentally human qualities. Emotion is an attribute that humans can express through their actions and words. Throughout this book, we see many emotions that occurs sadness, anger, confusion, and happiness. The one thing that we humans have over all other creatures in the world is intelligence and rational. This characteristic is also seen in this novel. Using Christopher Boon and his father, these attributes of a human can be discovered.

Christopher is a very different individual. Not just because he is autistic and he is a genius, but, he is influenced by his emotions to make his decisions. In the first few pages, he says that he can not really understand these different feelings. Although he can not understand them, he still feels these emotions. One emotion that we see with Christopher is confusion. Whenever Chris is confused or can not understand something, he crouches over o his knees, holds his stomach and makes a groaning type noise. This makes him feel better when he is confused. On page 112, Chris has a total break down when he finds out that his mother is actually alive. He does not know what to do or what to say. Chris says, “Then I stopped reading…I tried rally hard to think if there was any other explanation but I couldn’t think of one…because my brain wasn’t working properly. I felt giddy…I rolled onto the bed and curled up in a ball. My stomach hurt.” We see in this book that is very true is that Christopher is very smart, but in this incident he could not think, feel, or understand that his mother is alive. Christopher’s emotions make him human in my eyes because he is just like everyone else in the world, who are confused about many things. We just handle them in a different way.

Desire is something that we all have as humans. We always want something. We always are striving to be a better person or be a better student. We all desire something. Christopher has desire too. Throughout the novel we see that Chris is a very, very rational person who will only do things the he approves to be okay. In the second half of the book, desire takes over and makes him do things that he would not usually be thought to do. Going to the train station, looking for his rat on the ground, and even running from the police, just to get to his mother’s place in London is an example of his desire to see his mother. The entire second half of the novel consists of Christopher’s excursion to London, in which he does things that he usually would have not. Desire made him go against his own rational thinking and character that we saw at the beginning of the book. Desire made him human.

Christopher’s father is the most human to me. He is a single parent trying to survive with an autistic son. Not everyone in the world is perfect. The father continually gets frustrated with Chris and gets mad at him. To know what you did wrong and to own up to it, is very true to humans. We have never seen a monkey apologize to another monkey for stealing its bananas. On page 122, the father says, “We all make mistakes, Christopher. You, me, your mum, everyone. And sometimes they’re really big mistakes. We’re only human.” The father understood that he made a mistake of keeping his wife’s life a secret to Chris, but he was only doing it for Christopher’s own good.

The decision to keep Christopher’s mother a secret is another action that makes the father human. We can easily see that the father loves his son very much and would do anything for him. The father’s entire decision making is made revolving around Christopher. The Love of his son makes him make decisions, such as keeping his ex-wife’s life a secret. He was too afraid for Christopher and how he would react to the feeling that his mother left him for someone else. It is hard enough to have divorced parents, but being autistic and only knowing that your mother was always there to help you makes it even harder. The father makes irrational decisions to please his son in everything that he does. This only makes him human because, everyone has made or done things that are based upon our love or feelings of someone or something in our life.

These two characters are made human by emotion and rational. Mark Haddon put these two characters in positions that we probably would have made also if we were in that exact same problem. We are all human and we all make mistakes and decisions based upon our emotions. We are just human.(831)