Christopher's Appeal

Christopher's dad, Ed, seemed so freaked out over the investigation of the dog murder that I should have known that he killed Wellington. Ed's disposition gradually grows more terse has the story progresses. At first I had a great deal of sympathy for him, raising an autistic child alone. It was when he was violent with Chris over the book that I finally began to suspect him of somehow being involved with the dog's death.

Chris is primarily in search of a way to bring order to his world. This makes his father's deception seem ever more sinister, since the caregiver of an autistic person's main responsibility should be to keep that person's world as ordered as possible. Christopher compares his thinking to photographs, that are all real and in the order in which the events occurred. Christopher also compares his thinking to a slicing machine in a bakery. He shows how his mind processes information at a different rate than other people. He also uses the colors on vehicles that he sees on the way to school to determine what kind of day he will have.

He can be supremely logical in one instance and completely irrational in the next. Not knowing how Christopher will react to any given situation adds suspense to the novel. These qualities, such as his lack of emotion, alternating between being over-analytical and not so rational, and his inability to deal with being touched, would be entirely unappealing in a normal, adult character. By telling this story through Christopher's lens, the audience can accept what would normally be viewed as serious character flaws, because we learn to intimately understand his disability.