The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

The writer Mark Haddon tells the story very well through lots of different techniques such as language, sentence structure, lexis and many more. The books starts of with the young boy who is the narrator finding a dead dog at '7 minutes past 12' (note this is very precise) in his neighbours garden.

The narrator is autistic which makes him very emotionally undetected but very exact and detailed. This sort of narrator makes the piece more emotional for the audience and almost humorous in the way that he describes things that should make you cringe in a manner that is not really understood but very laid back. This implies that the writer is inadequate as the audience are not only feeling more emotion than him but it's as if the young boy does not know the implications of him being in the garden with the dark dog could be, he would not understand how this would make him look guilty. So to some extent this makes him very naive.

The genre of this book is a detective crime novel with a hint of mystery, because the passage at the end leaves us with 'I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him.' Does he find out? Is he blamed? I feel that this shows the lexis well because it is simple and straight to the point instead of being upset about the dog being dead he is more interested in how and who. This is very much like when the boy say's 'The dog is dead' very stating the obvious and very factual as if he has not thought about what he is saying.

A technique used in this piece is the sentence structure and I think this is what best shows the characteristics of the autistic boy and gives connotations towards his autism. The very long factual rambling shows it well because there is no feelings or descriptions at all with shows he is quite literally saying exactly what he see's exactly and autistic child would do because they wouldn't understand. However, the short, mundane, blunt sentences also give the same effect of no emotion and stating the obvious. The piece is written in first person but because the autistic characteristics vary much dominates the story line it lack description and adjectives.

The graphology and structure of the piece reflects that character. The text in black Arial very plain and simple, which reflects the simple ness of the narrator. The structure has a large paragraph of rambling in the middle this is where the young boy is trying to decide himself what has happened. This is followed by shorter sentences where he is making his own conclusions and deciding that he himself will find out exactly what happened to the dead dog. Along with this the chapter numbers are all I prime numbers starting with 2. This will be one of the boys' autistic characteristics and says a lot about how the rest of the book is going to be specific to him.

The language the boy uses is colloquial, not to us or to his age