Order & Disorder - Quotes
English Lit: Edexcel IGCSE The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, topic 5.3.3
Theme of Order and Disorder - Quotations
Christopher interprets the world through logic and facts. Here are a few key quotations:
Christopher's investigation
- Christopher depends upon:
- precise details (“It was seven minutes after midnight…”)
- reasoning and deduction (“I only know one person who didn’t like Mrs Shears and that is Mr Shears… This means that Mr Shears is my Prime Suspect”).
Coping strategies
- “Count the cubes of the cardinal numbers”.
- Christopher finds safety and security in a world which can be measured and predicted precisely, hence his interest in subjects such as physics and astronomy.
"Lies"
- Christopher considers metaphors to be “lies” because “imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot”.
Stories
- Siobhan tries to help Christopher develop by getting him to see the value of “stories” as a way of making sense of the world.
- Christopher is initially reluctant to allow his notebook to be turned into a performance, because acting is “pretending” and so “is like a kind of lie.”
- But Siobhan offers the example of Sherlock Holmes stories to argue that “people find things which are kind of true in things which are made up”.