Curious

Right now I'm reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and it was my favorite book so far this year until last night. Last night I realized I don't sympathize anymore with the protagonist/narrator. You see, the narrator has autism and everything is told through his perspective which is interesting and that wasn't a problem until halfway through the book when something big was revealed.

And what I realized is I didn't feel the same about his situation as he feels. After two major revelations from his father, which were scary and horrible and all, the narrator becomes afraid of his father. And while a part of me completely understands, there is also a part of me that doesn't feel the same because I don't feel his father would ever really hurt him. He could in all plausible honesty, but I don't really feel the same fear that he would as the narrator.

The other problem - and I know this is going to sound really, really horrible - is that I don't feel like the narrator feels love. I don't feel a sense of loss other than a loss of feeling safe. I don't feel like he's being pulled between a fear of what his father is capable of and a sense of the father he's losing. I feel like he's losing a longtime roommate and not a father, and I feel like his father feels like he's losing his son. I know that the book is being true to the logical way autistic children approach life and I'm sure there is love underlying that logic but I don't feel it and so I'm only reading to see how the book concludes and not because I care what happens to the narrator. I feel at this point like no matter what happens I won't really care and I'm not rooting for a certain outcome. That's a problem because a lot of people would have put this book down by this point, I think.

I like the approach of giving a voice to autistic children and trying to understand how they navigate the world. But - but - it's really hard, and we've talked about this before, to read a whole novel where the main character isn't someone you can sympathize with. It's hard to explain because the things that happened in the part of the story I read last night are horrible and I do sympathize with his situation but (I'm a bad person) I just don't sympathize with him. He exhibits signs of loss, like when he vomits after one thing is revealed or screams after the second is revealed, but he's disconnected from those feelings and in fiction this causes me to be disconnected from them, too. If more than one person reads this blog, and I doubt it and that one person is probably going to be appalled at my reaction, but if more than one person reads this I'll probably get many angry comments about being unsympathetic to a person with a disability. But I can't help feeling frustrated.

Maybe that's the point. I'm sure often with autistic children the people around them become frustrated with the lack of emotion or the quirks or what seem like sudden outbursts. Maybe I'm meant to come out of this with more patience because I'll have learned something about how different minds think about or handle situations. And I will, and I feel like I have learned. But that doesn't make the story any more compelling. I think I'll really feel bad if more horrible things happen (I will feel bad) because he's just a kid no matter how detatched he seems to be from his emotions. But (sighhhhh) I think this could be any character and I would feel bad for him. Giving him autism wasn't enough to make him compelling.

I remember once in workshop a fellow student wrote about a character who had a stutter, and our professor asked what made this character special beyond having a stutter. And none of us could answer, because if we took away the stutter the character was bland and uninteresting. The narrator in Curious Incident is a little more fleshed out and just a tad more real but still not gripping.

Maybe I'll read the next page and all this will change. I don't know. I'm jumping the gun a little here, I do know that, but I just wanted to get out how I felt. I'll have a full report sometime this weekend.