Christopher’s Phobia of Touches: A Curable Disease Represented in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Abstract

Christopher Boone, the first-person narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), displays a curious symptom, phobia of bodily touches in every human relationship. Most existing studies have viewed Christopher’s phobia of touches as a typical symptom exhibited by autistic people, but this paper argues that Christopher’s symptom is engaged to expose a ubiquitous social phenomenon shared by a host of people in fiction and reality. Conceptualizing Christopher’s phobia of touches as not an individual problem belonging to a small group of people who are ostensibly disabled, but as a universal phenomenon that is caused and fostered in a particular sociocultural setting, this paper recognizes a range of sociocultural domains as responsible for development of the illness. Christopher can be viewed as a wounded individual who acquires this pathological symptom while living in a traumatic social setting rooted in the ideology of being normal. Within society, the protagonist is affected by social emotions such as shame, disgust, and fear of potential contagion, and consequently, develops a phobia of touches. This paper also notes that traumatic relationships, which involve unpleasant types of touches, may be a crucial factor causing the character’s rejection of touches. What should be emphasized is that Christopher’s phobia of touches could resolve through ongoing effort and support from surrounding social community, since it is a socially acquired illness, rather than a biological condition resulting from a neurological difference. Calling for readers’ attention to Christopher’s illness represented in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the present discussion encourages contemplation regarding how to rescue the character from the autistic world where he is increasingly distanced from human touches, and trapped in an oppressive silence without mutual connections with others.