CIDNT-Style
For an AP level book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is written very simply. The book is even scattered with numerous pictures which honestly make the book very easy to read. This is the book that I read the fastest all year because of how simply it was written. The reason why the book is so simple and actually quite random is because it is written by Chris. OK, not actually. It is really written by Mark Haddon but he wrote the book as if it is Chris's.
One of the biggest plot points in this book is that Chris tries to write a murder mystery novel about the death of Mr. Wellington. As it turns out, this book is his murder mystery book. It has every aspect of one too. The beginning starts with the crime, Chris tries to solve the crime, the murderer is figured out, and lastly the repercussions are faced. OK, it may seem like a little bit of a stretch but there is hard evidence that it is Chris's novel.
1) The most obvious point is that it is written in first person perspective of Chris. Many books are written like this however so it does not say much.
2) The biggest piece of evidence is the chapters. In one of the first chapters Chris explains that "I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers"(11) At a first glance this means nothing to the reader. However, the chapters of this book are all prime numbers. Chris is the only human being to ever write a book with the chapters jumping around because they are prime numbers.
At a first glance of this book I was very confused by the chapters. Of course when choosing my book for this project a big factor was amount of pages, because I am a fourth quarter senior and I knew that I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew because I would fail horribly. So, this book jumped out at me because it has only 221 pages. A nice manageable amount. As I dug deeper I found that the book at 233 chapters. That stuck out to me because there are not many books where there are more chapters than pages because chapters are usually composed of multiple pages. Unless each chapter was extremely short having that many chapters seems impossible. However, it was quickly realized that the chapters jump multiple numbers because they are all prime numbers. I know that to me this made the book stand out from others. Being very unique makes me want to read a book because a lot of the times books can be very generic and predictable. For example, when I read The Road for my last blog it has no chapters. It was one continuous piece of text with no real chapter breaks. I chose that book because the author's style stood out to me and made me want to read the book. This is the same thing that happened here.
More specifically, Haddon's style allows for easy detection of literary devices. Personally, I find symbolism to be one the hardest literary devices to find. Technically, anything can symbolize anything as long as there is evidence to support it, making it hard to determine what is actually symbolism. However, the easiest detection of symbolism came at the end of the book where Mr. Shear "drops off" Chris's mom's items. Drops is a loose term because "Mr. Shears was in the taxi and he got out of the taxi and threw a big cardboard box of things belonging to Mother onto the lawn...a photograph of me in a silver frame. And the glass in the photograph frame broke when it fell onto the grass" (213-214). Now I'm no College Board employee but even I can see the symbolism involved. Clearly, the shattered glass represents Chris's life since his father lied to him. For the most part everything in Chris's life was completely fine before he found out that his mother was alive. A huge wedge was drawn between him and his father and his life got extremely complicated for him. He even didn't want to be in the presence of his father because of what he did to him. Chris even broke his mother's relationship with Mr. Shears in a way due to him wanting to live with them. His whole life went from a picture perfect world to a shattered broken version of what it used to be.
One of the biggest plot points in this book is that Chris tries to write a murder mystery novel about the death of Mr. Wellington. As it turns out, this book is his murder mystery book. It has every aspect of one too. The beginning starts with the crime, Chris tries to solve the crime, the murderer is figured out, and lastly the repercussions are faced. OK, it may seem like a little bit of a stretch but there is hard evidence that it is Chris's novel.
1) The most obvious point is that it is written in first person perspective of Chris. Many books are written like this however so it does not say much.
2) The biggest piece of evidence is the chapters. In one of the first chapters Chris explains that "I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers"(11) At a first glance this means nothing to the reader. However, the chapters of this book are all prime numbers. Chris is the only human being to ever write a book with the chapters jumping around because they are prime numbers.
At a first glance of this book I was very confused by the chapters. Of course when choosing my book for this project a big factor was amount of pages, because I am a fourth quarter senior and I knew that I didn't want to bite off more than I could chew because I would fail horribly. So, this book jumped out at me because it has only 221 pages. A nice manageable amount. As I dug deeper I found that the book at 233 chapters. That stuck out to me because there are not many books where there are more chapters than pages because chapters are usually composed of multiple pages. Unless each chapter was extremely short having that many chapters seems impossible. However, it was quickly realized that the chapters jump multiple numbers because they are all prime numbers. I know that to me this made the book stand out from others. Being very unique makes me want to read a book because a lot of the times books can be very generic and predictable. For example, when I read The Road for my last blog it has no chapters. It was one continuous piece of text with no real chapter breaks. I chose that book because the author's style stood out to me and made me want to read the book. This is the same thing that happened here.
More specifically, Haddon's style allows for easy detection of literary devices. Personally, I find symbolism to be one the hardest literary devices to find. Technically, anything can symbolize anything as long as there is evidence to support it, making it hard to determine what is actually symbolism. However, the easiest detection of symbolism came at the end of the book where Mr. Shear "drops off" Chris's mom's items. Drops is a loose term because "Mr. Shears was in the taxi and he got out of the taxi and threw a big cardboard box of things belonging to Mother onto the lawn...a photograph of me in a silver frame. And the glass in the photograph frame broke when it fell onto the grass" (213-214). Now I'm no College Board employee but even I can see the symbolism involved. Clearly, the shattered glass represents Chris's life since his father lied to him. For the most part everything in Chris's life was completely fine before he found out that his mother was alive. A huge wedge was drawn between him and his father and his life got extremely complicated for him. He even didn't want to be in the presence of his father because of what he did to him. Chris even broke his mother's relationship with Mr. Shears in a way due to him wanting to live with them. His whole life went from a picture perfect world to a shattered broken version of what it used to be.
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