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Christopher and Junior’s Journey from Home in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

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Christopher, the main protagonist in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon and Junior, the main character in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi, face difficult problems through their teenage years which they eventually overcome. Christopher, a fourteen year old boy from Great Britain struggles for social acceptance as a result of his autism. He struggles with empathy and understanding nuances in relationships and as a result, dislikes all forms of interaction. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Junior is a boy who struggles as he transfers from his reservation high school to a white high school. He also has hydrocephalus and is susceptible to seizures. Both …show more content…

“You have to leave this reservation”. (42) Mr. P tells Junior that he has no hope on the reservation. This vital advice convinces Junior to leave the reservation. This is an extremely brave thing to do because Junior is going to have to start a new lifestyle at an affluent high school. Junior attends Rearden, a white public school twenty miles from the reservation. Junior is different from the white students because of his personality, socioeconomic status, and race. It is very hard for a smart Indian boy to fit in at a white, sports obsessed, public school. Christopher and Junior need to leave home because they both fear their fathers and they have no hope. The boys use certain lifeboats to escape reality, and to find their own little worlds. Junior started to make friends at Rearden, but then the Indian kids hated him because he was a “white-lover”. To escape from all of these problems occurring in his life, he draws cartoons. “So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation. I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats”. (6) Junior also thinks that drawing cartoons can give him hope; a hope of escaping the reservation. “I feel like I might grow up to be somebody important. An artist. Maybe a famous artist. Maybe a rich artist.” (6) There are two very important words in this quotation that do not associate

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