Lie Theme in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Essay Example

In life, it is important to search for answers in life. The character Ed struggles to realize that lying can cost you a lot. For Ed, it was almost losing his son. In Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time, Christopher learns the importance of searching for answers in life by trying to solve the mystery of Wellington’s death because he is curious about the world outside of his experiment and he likes dogs. He searches for answers because he wants to write a mystery novel about Wellington’s death.

At first, Chris needs answers. So Chris decides to go up to Wellington’s dead body. Eileen Shears, Wellington’s owner, sees Chris with the dead body of her dog. She calls the cops and Chris gets taken to the police station, where they call his father. A few days later, at one of his in-school therapy sessions, his school therapist Siobhan suggests that he writes a book about Wellington’s death. So, he does just that. Christopher is now extremely curious as to who killed Wellington and why they did it. Due to his curiosity, he asks the neighbors if they know anything about the death.

However, when Christopher realizes all the lies he had been told, in his search for truth, he is forced to make some difficult decisions. Chris finds out that Ed, his father, lied about his mother’s death. Judy, his mother, mysteriously “died” of a heart attack. After Ed took and hid Chris’s notebook, he went searching in his father’s room and found a shirt box full of letters placed in the bottom of Ed’s closet. Chris decides that since they are addressed to him, it’s okay for him to read the letters. It was as he read the letters that Chris realised that Ed had lied to him. Once Ed saw that Chris had read all of the letters, he finally broke down and opened up about the truth. Chris found out the harsh truth from the letters, which leads to him getting scared of his father and deciding to run away and move to London with his mother.

As a result, when Chris is searching for answers, he goes through a series of problems. Chris makes his way to London on the train. On his way, he met a lot of people and overcame some of his fears.  He manages to get to his mother’s house and after being invited in from the cold rain, he stays there. Though Chris got the answers to his question regarding Wellington's death, he now needs to find answers to another question. “Will Father also hurt me out of anger?” Due to this question and fear, he decides to move in with his mother and her boyfriend. Chris has to look for answers so that he can find the truth. He decided to make his way to London because he’s scared of his father and he wants to see if his mother is actually alive.

Mark Haddon emphasizes the importance of searching for answers in life with the symbol of Judy’s letters to Chris and the book that Chris wrote. Chris’s book led him to the letters that hid the truth. The letters lead Chris to the overwhelming answers of “Who killed Wellington?”, allowing him to finish the book. The letters also answered the unasked questions of “What happened to my mother?” and “Why did she die so young?” It is really important to search for answers in life because it can help you live a good life and be a better person. A good life would be filled with a few people that you know that you can trust your life with. For Christopher, he decided that it was much safer to stay with his mother rather than living in constant fear at his father’s house. Being a better person would be listening to what people have to say (even if it’s boring), helping people out when they need it, and observing the smallest details.

Christopher learns that if you want answers, you need to search for them. If you just sit there and do nothing, you're never gonna find out the truth or get the answers you desire. If you search for the answers, you will feel more content than you did before because you found out something you didn’t know before. The truth and answers that you find will make you stronger, better, and smarter than you were before you found the answers. Haddon teaches the audience that searching for answers in life can help you feel good and have a good life while being a good person. These answers can help you change your bad habits and lead you to be a better person than you were. All people struggle to pay attention to the smallest details because they don’t know that the smallest details usually reveal the biggest ones. It is important to realize that karma is real. If you lie to everyone, you’re going to lose something valuable or someone important. The world treats you the way that you treat the environment and people around you. For Ed, he learned that lying would have made him lose his son.