Seeing Life Through New Eyes: Disability and Perception in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident

Abstract

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) portrays disability through the eyes of a neurodivergent child Christopher Boone. The novel exemplifies the disability discourse that illustrates perception, logic and senses, as alternative ways of engaging with the world. The paper goes beyond the medical model of disability and adopts the social model in exploring the ways communication apprehension, societal attitudes and streotyped expectations of the world marginalise neurodivergent people. The paper analyses, through the keen lens of narrative voice and structure, Christopher’s world to challenge the dominant paradigms of the world, intelligence and reason. The novel articulates disability to the absence of perception and invites the readers from the stems of empathy and inclusion disability discourse to view disability from the lens of a difference to perception, thus contributing to the discourse of contemporary literature and disability studies in a significant way.