The title of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is a reference to a famous Sherlock Holmes story by Sir Conan Arthur Doyle. Baker Street's most famous resident deduces who committed the crime in this particular story by interpreting a clue in a very different way than usual: the mystery is solved not based on what a dog did but rather because of what he didn't: I bark. In light of its relationship to Haddon's novel, it is interesting to note that the character of Sherlock Holmes has gone from being seen simply as an emotionless robotic calculating machine to, as a very popular recent TV show described him, a sociopath high functioning. . The facts of Sherlock Holmes remain unchanged; it is the interpretation that has changed. If The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time had been written twenty years ago, the interpretation of the narrator's unnamed “behavioral condition” could have been interpreted as mental retardation or even mild schizophrenia. Today it is easy to interpret the condition as autism or Asperger syndrome. The real lesson The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time seems to be aiming at is that facts divorced from interpretation do not equal truth. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Point of view is everything in the novel. Christopher Boone at one point observes that “the mind is just a complicated machine.” The book is full of declarative observations of fact or opinion like this, but this statement is one of the few times he attempts to interpret what to him is fact. What ultimately adds up to a big pile of brutally honest factual statements from Christopher should, by all accounts, have the effect of making him incredibly easy to understand. But, as Christopher notes, “the rule for calculating prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula to tell you whether a very large number is a prime number or what the next one will be.” For Christopher, this is simply a mathematical fact and any interpretation will apply equally to mathematics, but the reader can interpret that what is true for prime numbers is also true for people. There is no simple formula for using just the facts of someone's life to understand what is really going on in their mind. Christopher almost seems to understand this intuitively. At one point he admits, "I didn't understand that other people had minds." It might seem like the kind of bizarre statement that only someone suffering from a brain disorder like autism would make. (Or as someone suffering from schizophrenia might if you played him twenty years ago.) However, he goes on to say that he got around this failure by deciding to view the way others think as "a kind of puzzle, and if something is a riddle there is always a way to solve it.” While it may seem bizarre not to understand that other people have minds, isn't that just how most people treat others most of the time? Realizing that other people have minds of their own doesn't mean you don't expect that mind to work exactly the same way as yours. So it makes sense that the entire book is driven by Christopher's desire to solve the mystery of who killed the dog If you are going to try to solve a crime, you should expect to be able to think like the person who committed the crime. Since Sherlock Holmes is such an important “character” in the novel, it is difficult to ignore the difference in point of view between the books on about him and this book about one of his greatest.