How we cite our quotes:
Quote #1
I do not like people shouting at me. It makes me scared that they are going to hit me or touch me and I do not know what is going to happen. (5.5)
The first part of this is pretty inarguable – none of us wants to be shouted at or hit, right? But then Christopher takes a pretty big leap, suggesting that he needs to always know what's going to happen, and what everyone around him is going to do next. Now that's a recipe for disaster.
Quote #2
Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. (11.1)
This naturally implies that Christopher has difficulty with most other people because, well, he doesn't know what "they are meant to be doing," and that makes him nervous.
Quote #3
This made me feel a lot calmer because it is what policemen say on television and in films. (17.2)
We can understand that Christopher is reassured by the fact that policemen behave in the way he expects. But this almost suggests that he considers the fictional world on TV more "real" than the world in which he actually lives and breathes.
Quote #4
The rule for working out prime numbers is really simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. If a number is really, really big, it can take a computer years to work out whether it is a prime number. (19.6)
What's wrong with this mathematical picture? We thought Christopher was all about logic and order, so shouldn't he hate prime numbers? They're just about the least-orderly things around. Even computers can't predict where they're going to show up! What makes prime numbers different, such that they don't make him uneasy like other unpredictable things?
Quote #5
I was also wearing my watch and they wanted me to leave this at the desk as well but I said that I needed to keep my watch on because I needed to know exactly what time it was. And when they tried to take it off me I screamed, so they let me keep it on. (23.4)
The police are about to put Christopher into a jail cell. This doesn't bother him at all – in fact, he's quite happy there. His insistence on keeping his watch is similar – just as he's quite happy being restricted in space, he needs some sort of boundaries in time as well. He needs things to have order, and for time to be divided into neatly segmented minutes.
Quote #6
He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn't very logical.
I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order. And that was why I had Good Days and Black Days. [...]
I said that when Father got up in the morning he always put his trousers on before he put his socks on and it wasn't logical but he always did it that way, because he liked things in a nice order, too. Also whenever he went upstairs he went up two at a time always starting with his right foot. (47.2-4)
This once again points to Christopher's desire for stability and structure. Here, he makes the argument that not only do we all want some structure, but we all find individual (and often arbitrary) ways to do so – anything to establish some control over chaos.
Quote #7
And sometimes Mrs. Shears stayed overnight at our house and I liked it when she did because she made things tidy and she arranged the jars and pans and tins in order of their height on the shelves in the kitchen and she always made their labels face outwards and she put the knives and forks and spoons in the correct compartments in the cutlery drawer. (67.99)
On the surface, this quote points us back to Christopher's desire for order in the world around him. But, beneath that, it says something about his relationship with the people in that world as well. Here, the role of "mother" in Christopher's household is arguably reduced to cleaning the house and arranging the things in the kitchen. As long as Mrs. Shears does that, this suggests that her installment as surrogate mother is okay with Christopher. Is that a fair judgment to make?
Quote #8
I wondered whether I should open the envelope because it was something I had taken from Father's room. But then I reasoned that it was addressed to me so it belonged to me so it was OK to open it. (149.50)
Is Christopher using twisted logic to justify actions he very well knows are wrong? Or is he proving that although common sense suggests these actions are wrong, they're actually logically sound?
Quote #9
And then I Formulated a Plan. And that made me feel better because there was something in my head that had an order and a pattern and I just had to follow the instructions one after the other. (179.30)
Check out the way this is expressed. Making decisions as they come up doesn't work for Christopher. Instead, he gives himself a list of instructions, and then takes a step back and follows those instructions, essentially forgetting that he's the author. Is this, in a sense, denying himself free will?
Quote #10
And then the next train came I wasn't so scared any more because the sign said TRAIN APPROACHING so I knew it was going to happen. (227.8)
It might be just the way he expresses it, but once again, this quote suggests that it isn't simply that Christopher needs things to have an order to them, but that he needs to know about that order – to be a part of it, and in effect have some control over it. (We can only wonder what would happen if someone said, "Yes, Christopher, there is an order to the way this thing works. But we can't tell you what it is." If you ask us, that wouldn't really cut it.)
Quote #11
And the next morning I looked out of the window in the dining room to count the cars in the street to see whether it was going to be a Quite Good Day or a Good Day or a Super Good Day or a Black Day, but it wasn't like being on the bus to school because you could look out of the window for as long as you wanted and see as many cars as you wanted and I looked out of the window for three hours and I saw 5 red cars in a row and 4 yellow cars in a row which meant it was both a Good Day and a Black Day so the system meant it was both a Good Day and a Black Day so the system didn't work any more. (229.43)
Wow, this is a big moment. Christopher has been totally removed from all of the structure and routines that he had back in Swindon. Now, super far away in London, he looks out at the world and sees that the rules he has placed upon things (in order to order them, you might say) don't work anymore, and all along only existed in his own mind.