Throughout this semester, we’ve been reading novels in which the main characters, in some way, are portrayed as being outsiders. Pip, Lolly, and Flory all didn’t quite seem to fit in, though the reasons for their outsider-ness varied. However, it seems to me that of these characters, Christopher seems to be the biggest outsider. Pip, born common, didn’t fit in with the high-class people he lived with in London, Lolly seemed to prefer to be on her own, and Flory was a transplant from England living in a foreign land, but Christopher’s entire world seems to be different from the world of the people around him. I found it interesting that throughout the novel, he seems to be constantly translating his thoughts or rationale to us, the readers. He writes the book as if he is anticipating that it will be read by people who are like his dad, his mom, and Siohban – not autistic. When he talks about why the color pattern of cars that he sees while on the bus will determine whether it will be a good day or a bad day for him, he compares this to when we (the people outside his world) feel cheerful or down because of what the weather is like. What I found interesting while I was reading is that while Christopher tries to explain his thoughts in terms of things that will make sense to us, you can still tell that there is a fundamental lack of understanding for him about certain aspects of the thought processes of other people. For instance, Christopher can tell you that people don’t like to think of themselves as being like computers because they think that our ability to feel emotion separates us from computers, but he doesn’t really understand this belief or why people feel this way – all he can do is tell us that people do believe this, and why he thinks that this belief is wrong. His relationship to people outside of his world or his understanding is a little bit like someone who studies a foreign language from a book and learns solely from a book how to speak a perfectly grammatical version of that language. If this person goes to that foreign country and starts talking with native speakers, he will be able to define the words that are being spoken to him, but the idioms and subtle meanings and nuances that make up that language will be lost to him, and he will be constantly having to translate in his head in order to understand what is going on around him. Because of this, a huge portion of what is being said to him will simply be lost in translation.