Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing Up
Trust
Truth, Love, and Safety
Logic vs. Emotion
Perspective and the Absurdity of the World
Summary
Analysis
As Christopher sleeps, he has one of favorite dreams, which he has often. In the dream, almost everyone on Earth has died from a virus spread through understanding people’s expressions paired with something they say. In some versions of the dream, infected people die from sitting around doing nothing. In others, the virus makes them die in more violent ways that get rid of their bodies at the same time. Eventually, the only people left are those like Christopher who don’t understand people’s expressions.
This dream shows Christopher’s ideal world, which he escapes to in sleep after a very traumatic journey. In the real world, people like Christopher are often at a disadvantage, but in his dream world, they are favored with a special immunity to the disease, which would theoretically make other people want to be like him, something he has probably never experienced—his presumed “disability” becomes a gift.
Themes
In the dream, Christopher can go anywhere he wants, do whatever he wants, and not have to deal with other people. The whole world is quiet, and he can go into other people’s houses and take whatever he wants from stores. He climbs across roofs and drives someone’s car to the beach. He stands in the water and uses a ruler on the horizon to show that the Earth is round. Then he goes home, makes himself red food, watches a movie, plays computer games, and goes to bed.
Christopher would be completely happy being alone. He finds so much to interest him in small, normal things, such as visually seeing that the Earth is round, that he would never need human company or the trappings of civilization to live a full life. Even though he’s proved by his journey that he can make his way through the world, that doesn’t mean he wants to.
Themes
