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The Price Of Growing Beyond Innocence: Examining The Literary Lineage Of Mark Haddon’S The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, James A. Clark

English 502: Research Methods

Through a thorough examination of textual clues in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, particularly those moments in the narrative in which Christopher Boone begins to develop an understanding of his own emotional and developmental limitations, as well as the results of that burgeoning understanding, this essay seeks to establish Haddon’s novel as a subtle homage to—if not the direct progeny of—Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and other noteworthy works of literature in which a fictional protagonist, originally limited mentally or intellectually, suffers emotional anguish brought on by self-awareness resulting from either internal action …