This Disability Which Is Not One: Autistic Intermittency in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System o date, autism has been diagnosed on the basis of behavioral characteristics. No identifying neurological or biomedical insignia that is specific and universal to autism has yet been determined, only hypothesized or surmised. We must take as our focus the outward diagnostic signs of autism, the decisive property of which, in aggregate, is their heterogeneity. Christopher Boone, the protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, displays an extensive yet quite partial slate of these symptomatic markers: a taste and talent for systemic pattern recognition, difficulty with nonverbal cues, detachment and dysfunctionality, stimming, enhanced visual perception, obsessive routines, detail orientation, susceptibility of savantism, tremendous rote memory, poor facial reading/recognition, empathetic deficits, psychic rigidity, imaginative defects, aversion to being touched, inability to lie, mindblindness or mentalizing deficiency (otherwise known as failed theory of mind). Other such markers include (but are not limited to) perseveration, weak central coherence, poor executive function, attentional deficits, language delay/deficiency, susceptibility to intellectual handicaps, poor eye contact, an inability to imitate, imitative echolalia, narrow but passionate interests, vestibular and proprioceptive issues, literal mindedness, synesthetic tendencies, transition problems, sensory hyperarousal, and deficiency/ proficiency in abstract thought. As massive as the list is, the heterogeneity of autism cannot be gauged on an additive basis alone. No autistic person displays at any time more than a fraction of these markers; no autistic person J O S E P H V A L E N T E