"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" ❤️🐶

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

II MA English Class | 26th September 2025

#classdebate #onhisbirthdaytoday

Well, just today in the II MA Class, we had an exciting debate on the topic,

‘Street Dogs should be kept in Containment Zones: Agree? Disagree? It was quite a memorable debate with the class equally split in their affinities – 50% on either side.

Topic for today’s Debate suggested by: Mr. Milind

The Official Timer for today’s debate – Ms. Terese

The Group Leader for ‘Agree’ (Black Mic) – Ms. Sivasankari

The Group Leader for ‘Disagree’ (Red Mic) – Mr. Milind

Official Photographer: Ms. Safa

Mic Coordinators: Black Mic – Ms. Ann Mariah | Red Mic: Ms. Lindsay

Official Transcriber of the Debate: Ms. Nivedhaa (awaiting!)

[Black Mic for ‘Agree’ | Red Mic – ‘Disagree’]

Many from either side have expressed their desire to continue on the debate the next week as well. So we hope to! 😊

Coincidentally, and ‘curiously,’ Mark Haddon – whose birthday falls today – has written his award-winning masterpiece titled, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery novel that talks about the death of a dog, and the subsequent ‘awakenings’.

Well, two literary giants were born on this day.

T. S. Eliot and Mark Haddon!

#onhisbirthdaytoday

26 September

For today’s post, let’s do Haddon, Mark Haddon!

Mark Haddon is a British novelist, illustrator, and writer, best known for his novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was published in the year 2003.

Quite interestingly, the year 2003 has been a very eventful year for literature, as most of the novels published in this year, soon became bestsellers winning major awards and becoming cult classics in the process.

Some of these bestsellers are -

Dan Brown’s alternative religious history, The Da Vinci Code

Rowling’s fantasy novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake

Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake

Lauren Weisberger’s chick-lit fiction, The Devil Wears Prada

Mark Haddon’s first novel for adults, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time

are some of the bestsellers that were published in the year 2003.

Coming back to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time –

This mystery novel is narrated from the perspective of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old boy, who discovers that, his neighbour’s dog, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork.

Interestingly, Christopher is a mathematical genius who prefers logic, facts, and order. Hence the novel’s tone is very clinical and detached, even when describing traumatic events. One reason why, he struggles with understanding human emotions, social cues, and metaphors, which he sees as ‘lies’.

Moreover, the book is structured in a highly unusual way!

The chapters in the novel are numbered using prime numbers (e.g., 2, 3, 5, 7, 11), including diagrams, maps, drawings, and mathematical problems that are crucial to understanding how he processes information and makes sense of his chaotic world. 😊

Giving us all a few interesting snippets gleaned from the novel –

Just to help us engage with the text, which I personally feel, is so gripping right from the beginning –

It was 7 minutes after midnight.

The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep.

The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.

The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over.

I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I went through Mrs. Shears’s gate, closing it behind me. I walked onto her lawn and knelt beside the dog. I put my hand on the muzzle of the dog. It was still warm.

The dog was called Wellington. It belonged to Mrs. Shears, who was our friend. She lived on the opposite side of the road, two houses to the left.

Wellington was a poodle. Not one of the small poodles that have hairstyles but a big poodle. It had curly black fur, but when you got close you could see that the skin underneath the fur was a very pale yellow, like chicken. I stroked Wellington and wondered who had killed him, and why.

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.

Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing.

There was a policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which was poking out from one side.

The policewoman put her arms round Mrs. Shears and led her back toward the house.

I lifted my head off the grass. The policeman squatted down beside me and said,

“Would you like to tell me what’s going on here, young man?”

I sat up and said, “The dog is dead.”

“I’d got that far,” he said.

I said, “I think someone killed the dog.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

I replied, “I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.”

“And what, precisely, were you doing in the garden?” he asked.

“I was holding the dog,” I replied.

“And why were you holding the dog?” he asked.

This was a difficult question. It was something I wanted to do. I like dogs. It made me sad to see that the dog was dead.

I like policemen, too, and I wanted to answer the question properly, but the policeman did not give me enough time to work out the correct answer.

“Why were you holding the dog?” he asked again.

“I like dogs,” I said.

“Did you kill the dog?” he asked.

I said, “I did not kill the dog.”

“Is this your fork?” he asked.

I said, “No.”

“You seem very upset about this,” he said.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works.

Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.

This is how you work out what prime numbers are.

First you write down all the positive whole numbers in the world.

Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 3. Then you take away all the numbers that are multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. The numbers that are left are the prime numbers.

The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number.

Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

I’m sure this is added tempt for the reader to take to the book rightaway!

Here’s wishing you a Happy Haddon Time! 😊