The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Chapter 139 Quotes
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Chapter 139 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Quote 1
Then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle heard about the pictures and he said he believed they were real in an article in a magazine called The Strand. But he was being stupid, too, because if you look at the pictures you can see that the fairies look just like fairies in old books and they have wings and dresses and tights and shoes [...] (139.6)
Elsewhere in the book (181.9), Christopher tells a little fable about an economist, a logician, and a mathematician. The moral of the story is that we should be careful making generalizations. So should Christopher be so confident in his dismissal of fairies here? He can say the pictures in the magazine were fake, sure. But can he be <em>so</em> certain that fairies don't exist that he should ridicule other people (including one of his heroes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) for believing in them?
Quote 2
Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead. (139.10)
In that last clause, about how you can't talk to someone who's dead, Christopher is certainly writing about his mother, and feeling really separate from her. But in dismissing the existence of fairies, he's denying us the possibility of connecting to the mystical, magical sides of the world, and of ourselves. The only connection between beings he <em>does</em> allow is a dangerous one, and one that causes great harm: the relationship between murderer and victim. Eek.
Quote 3
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. (139.8)
Christopher aligns believing in something with not wanting to know the truth, and both of those things with being stupid. It's pretty harsh, right? He probably wouldn't appreciate it if someone told him <em>he</em> was stupid for dreaming of becoming an astronaut. Then why is okay for him to be so intolerant of other people's beliefs and dreams?