Autism, representation and culture in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Yonghong Hu’s My Running Shadow

Abstract

Autistic fiction is an emerging literary trend. Adopting a cross-cultural comparative approach, this essay examines how the autistic life is represented in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Hu Yonghong’s My Running Shadow (2014). It argues that, despite both offering a first-person perspective of the autistic child, whose voice has long been silenced within modern society, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time rejects the labels attached to the disorder and insists on the mere “difference” of the protagonist, whereas My Running Shadow not only embraces the term but attempts to glamorize the disability. While Haddon interweaves a bleak situation experienced by a dysfunctional family into a thrilling detective story, which becomes the protagonist’s way of exploring his relationship to the world as an autistic person, Hu creates an emotional personal account of seventeen years of the life of the protagonist and his mother stretching from infanthood to youth. Differences in cultural traditions and social policy play a significant role in the construction of the autistic and the family. Through a comparative reading of the two novels, the essay further argues that autistic fiction should be wary of any unnecessary metaphoric rendering of the disability or further marginalization of low-functioning autistic people.