Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Literary analysis
The help literary analysis
Help me write a literary analysis
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The Metaphor Concept
In The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon’s narrator Christopher addresses the concept of the metaphor in order to interpret why he thinks and feels as he does. Haddon brings out Christopher’s comparison of metaphors to lies in order to help the reader understand the basis of Christopher’s viewpoint of truth, love and lies. The concept of the metaphor is addressed in order to show how different Christopher is from other people in his viewpoint of his place in the world around him.
Haddon uses Christopher’s inability to understand metaphors in order to show how confused he is with the subtlety of language. Christopher states: “I think it [a metaphor] should be called a lie because a pig is not like
…show more content…
We are made to understand that Christopher believes that “loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me” (Haddon 137). Christopher’s assertion that all metaphors are lies means that he believes that the people who use metaphors in their speech do not love him. Thus, to Christopher, love equals truth and without truth there can not be love.
Haddon uses the truth/lie concept to further shape Christopher personality in the minds of the readers. Christopher recalls a conversation with his teacher: “And she said, "Are you telling the truth, Christopher?" And then I said, "I always tell the truth." And she said, "I know you do, Christopher. But sometimes we get sad about things and we don 't like to tell other people that we are sad about them” ( Haddon 109).
People who are unaffected by mental disability are able to easily relate to others in terms of showing emotion, most people feel that being sad is very personal and should not be shown. Christopher’s teacher asserts that people often conceal our feelings and keep things hidden. On the contrary, Christopher is incapable of relating to others when he feels emotional. He does not know how to show or hide his emotions through language or facial
Words have a way of changing the way we view the world. They can completely alter our perception of what is true and what is false. Take the tale of Skidmore and Manchester, as dictated in the story ‘The Curse of the Poisoned Pretzel.’ The way the author portrays the character of Skidmore shows just how easily words can change how we see someone by making you believe that Skidmore is guilty of his brother‘s murder, without ever formally saying so.
Richard’s own identity as well as his personal identification of others is formed through language. For example, in Richard’s encounter with the Yankee, Richard used language to fill up the “yawning, shameful gap.” He uses personification to emphasize the awkwardness of their conversation. This awkwardness was a result of the Yankee’s probing questions. Richard described it as an “unreal-natured” conversation, but, paradoxically, he also admits, “of course the conversation was real; it dealt with my welfare.” The Yankee man then tried to offer Richard a dollar, and spoke of the blatant hunger in Richard’s eyes. This made Richard feel degraded and ashamed. Wright uses syntax to appropriately place the conversation before making his point in his personal conclusions. In the analogy, “A man will seek to express his relation to the stars…that loaf of bread is as important as the stars” (loaf of bread being the metonymy for food), Wright concludes “ it is the little things of life “ that shape a Negro’s destiny. An interesting detail is how Richard refuses the Yankee’s pity; he whispers it. From then on, Richard identified him as an enemy. Thus, through that short, succinct exchange of words, two identities were molded.
With every decision one makes. There will always be consequences. In Haddon’s, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the character Christopher and his parents find that their bad decisions could lead to a negative outcome. Mrs. Boone’s choice to leave home and Mr. Boone’s choice to lie to Christopher lead to him leaving home to search for his mother. A common theme of the actions of the characters is acting before thinking. The theme of decisions and consequences reveals the imperfections of each character, ultimately demonstrating the quintessential impatient need for growth.
“He uses similes such as the breeze that ‘blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale frogs’ and that also made a shadow on the ‘wine-colored rug’ as ‘wind does on the sea’.”
In the short story “The Metaphor”, author Budge Wilson depicted a story about a girl named Charlotte discovering her own life through her teenage years. Throughout the duration of the story, Charlotte had moved from a shadow of her mother to becoming the unique and distinct herself today. It was evident that Charlotte was aware of her own thoughts and values for the first time when she wrote a metaphor describing Miss Hancock; an individual which no one around her loved.
Christopher during the course of the text of the novel learns to disregard other people’s judgments.
Point of view can greatly affect the way a reader feel about a novel. Point of view affects how the characters are perceived and how well the readers know them. It also provides a means for readers to feel connected with characters, or to better understand what a character is going through. The author’s way of thinking also has a very large impact on the point of view based on how they themselves see a situation. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is narrated in a very diverse way, by being narrated by a boy with a disorder, it could be very different if told by a different character, and it would change drastically if narrated by someone without autism.
Whilst the concept of autism and what it means to be autistic is still widely unrecognised by many, Mark Haddon’s use of conventions of prose fiction and language amplifies the distinctive qualities of the text. Haddon exemplifies key themes such as the struggle to become independent, the nature of difference and the disorder of life through the strategic placement of literary devices.
Guetti, James. "Absalom, Absalom!: The Extended Simile."The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner. Ithaca: Cornell, 1967. 69-108.
The signifying monkey invariable repeats to his friend, the Lion, some insult purportedly generated by their mutual friend, the Elephant. The Monkey, however, speaks figuratively. The Lion, indignant and outraged, demands an apology of the Elephant, who refuses and then trounces the Lion. The Lion, realizing that his mistake was to take the Monkey literally, returns to trounce the Monkey. It is this relationship between the literal and the figurative, and the dire consequences of their confusion, which is the most striking repeated element of these tales. The Monkey’s trick depends on the Lion’s inability to mediate between these two poles of signification, of meaning. (p.55)
The biggest reconnection Christopher encounters is with his mother. It begins when he finds a series of letters addressed to him in his father’s closet. Upon reading the letters, he makes the shocking discovery that his mother is alive, not dead, as his father previously tells him. Later, in trying to explain why he hides the truth, his father confesses he kills Wellington. As Christopher comes to these revelations, he immediately decides, “‘I had to go to London to live with Mother.’” (Haddon 131). This is a very powerful example of adapting. Christopher decides on the spot to go live with his mom despite not seeing her for years. The attitude of ‘sudden decisions’ without thinking long and hard about the full outcome is uncommon for him, and yet he comes to this solution in almost no time at all. Also, the wording of the sentence is very specific. He uses the word 'had' instead of 'can', which proves the idea is already set in his mind. As a result, this proves he already trusts his mother and is willing to adjust to go to her. Besides Christopher, his mother also expresses a likewise characteristic of adaptation to renew
Metaphors are used by Chesterfield, whereby he uses them to portray his son’s values. Chesterfield builds his son up, and provides all the obstacles that could come into his life in the near future. He takes his time to warn his son about the problems, and struggles that he is to face in the future through a metaphor where he says, “thorns and briars which scratched and disfigured me in the course of my youth” (Stanhope 91). He refers to these problems as thorns and briars. He was frightened that his son was going to make the same mistakes he made while he was a youth and so, he had to warn him in advance of what awaits him. He uses metaphors in his warnings just to emphasize his points. Later on, in his warnings to his son; Chesterfield also uses anastrophe in contradicting his points. He uses anastrophe as an understa...
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time chronicles of Christopher Boone of Swindon, England. The book is written by Mark Haddon, who formerly worked with autistic individuals, describes the world through the eyes of Christopher, who is self-proclaimed “special needs”. The novel never explicitly says what Christopher’s diagnosis is, but from the text it is apparent that he would fall on the higher functioning end of the Autism Spectrum.
In Mark Haddon's contemporary novel, "The curious incident of the dog in the Night-Time", the protagonist, Christopher Boone, does seem completely unsuited to narrating a novel, as he takes on his authorial voice, thus demonstrating symptoms of his disability, 'Asperger's Syndrome.' This is a syndrome that enables him to see the world only through his limited perspective, which is closed, frightened and disorientated - which results in his fear of, and inability to understand the perplexing world of people's emotions. His description of events can be somewhat unreliable as he is unable to see the real truths that lie before him. As he narrates, readers are confronted with his peculiarities - whether it is not liking to be touched, his fear of germs, strangers and crowds to his inability to eat foods with particular colors. However, through Christopher's authorial voice, his description of events in his life, and in particular, his description of his oddities those seem completely 'normal' to him, make him an interesting and fascinating narrator. As he can be proven to be an unreliable narrator as he is incapable of lying (and understanding lies) and this limits his ability to perceive the full reality of the world, thus providing him with a strange combination of credibility and unbelievability. Again, this is what makes him a wonderful narrator - at times readers can mistrust his interpretation of such events, or they can believe him.
The Pragmatic Theory. Searle proposed an account of metaphor that takes Davidson’s theory even further than the Naïve theory and rejects the idea of linguistic ambiguity idea (Lycan 184). Metaphorical utterance is taken to be a linguistic communication and it posits a cognitive mechanism that computes something that could be called metaphorical meaning. This theory of metaphor is the most compelling because metaphor is seen as simply of species of Gricean communication. The problem of explaining how we understand metaphor is a case of explaining how speaker meaning and sentence meaning can be divergent. Gricean logic can provide an instructive way to break down the problem of metaphorical meaning. This theory is the most plausible and overcomes Davidson’s leading objections to metaphorical meaning.