ABSTRACT
Christopher Boone, the fifteen-year-old narrator and protagonist of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, likes prime numbers. Christopher has Asperger’s syndrome and is a mathematical savant, and for him “prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them” (12). A prime number, of course, is a number divisible only by two integers-itself and one. Thus, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19 and so on are prime numbers, whereas 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, and so on, are not. As Christopher remarks, “[p]rime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away” (12).
