Chapter 233-The end

The next morning Christophers Mom calls her office and takes a Compassionate Leave so she can take him shopping but he doesn´t like it in the bus and starts screaming and rolling around on the floor so she has to take him back home. Then she leaves again alone to get him some new clothes and when she gets back Christopher tells her that he has to get back to Swindon because he has to take his A-Levels math test. His Mom tells him that that might be impossible. Afterwards Christopher goes out on the balcony to take look at the stars but he can´t see any so he goes to bed. But he can´t sleep so he gets up at night to walk around a little bit outside of the house. After a while he hears his Mom running down the street calling his name desperately so he comes out of the place he was hiding and promises her not to ever leave the appartement again on his own.
The next day his Mom gets a call from her office and they tell her that she is fired and that they already have a new woman for the job. So she gets really upset and when Christopher reminds her of his A-Level test she tells him that it won´t be possible and that there is too much stuff on her mind already. So she calls the school to get it postponed which really saddens Christopher and makes him feel bad for the next days because he was so excited about taking the test. In a following night Mr Shears comes into his room at night drunk and really mad at Christopher and says weird stuff until his Mom pulls him out the room.
The next morning his Mom tells him that they were going back to Swindon and he has to pack his stuff. So Christopher gets really excited because he thinks he can still take his A-Levels. They drive back to Swindon and wait in his Dads house until he comes home. Chris´s Mom then explains the situation to him and he leaves the house to live with Rhodri (his work colleague) until they have found a place to live. The next day they drive to the school to find out whether he could still take his A-Levels and Siobhan tells them that it would still be possible so Christopher decides to take them even though he is hungry and hasn´t slept a lot the last time.
So the following three days he takes his test and on the last day his Dad comes to the house to talk to him but he still doesn´t answer a lot because he is still kind of scared of him.
His Mom then soon gets a job and they move into another appartement. But he has to be at his Dads house everyday from 3:49 till 5:30 when his Mom is at work which he doesn´t like. Also Toby died because he was pretty old for a rat and Christopher burries it. One time he has to be at his Dad´s again his dad asks him whether they could talk again even it were just a couple of minutes everyday and to show him that he can trust him again he presents him a little dog. That really makes Christopher happy and on the same day he also gets his A-Level results: An A grade which is the best you can get. He now plans on taking Further Maths and the Physics tests next year and then go to university with his book and Sandy (thats´s how he called his little dog) and become a scientist. And he knows that he can make it becuase he went to London on his own and found his Mom and he found out who killed Wellington and he wrote a book!

Christophers favorite dream (Chapter 229)

In chapter 229 Christopher writes about his favorite dream which indicates really good how he feels about humans and show his autistic lineaments. In the dream the whole world population died from a virus and only him and a couple of other special children surived and then have the whole world for themselves where they can do whatever they want. In his dream Christopher takes his Dads van and drives to the beach and just stands there with his feet in the water and looks at the horizon and afterwards drives back home and plays computer games or watches videos for the rest of the day. This dream always makes Christopher really happy.

Chapter 197- Chapter 233

Christopher doesn´t like the many people inside the train so he stands still in the train carriage for a while until he hears somebody call his name. It is the policeman who now knows that Christopher is running away from his Dad and wants to take him to the police station to meet with him. But as he is talking to Christopher and asking him why he is running away the train starts and leaves the train station. He is then forced to sit down with Christopher and wait for the next stop to be picked up by a car. Because Christopher is so excited he starts to pee in his pants though and the policeman lets him go to the bathroom. But instead of going back to his seat Christopher hides on a shelf behind some suitcases because he feels safer there. So when the train stops and the policeman comes to get Christopher he doesn´t move because he doesn´t want to be taken back to his Dad. After he sits there for another while and the train stopped a couple of times, Christopher sees another policeman looking for himj under the seats and he decides to get off the train to escape from him. When he steps out to the Londoner train station he is overcharged at first with all the people and the brigth advertisements so it takes him a while to move on and get to the information stand to ask for his further way. The lady tells him which tube to take in which direction so Chris really concentrates and follows the signs to platform 3 and sits down on a bench. When the first tube comes Christopher starts to groan again and feels really uncomfortable because so many people walk into the station and out again and Christopher can´t even see the walls anymore. So Christopher sits there for a long time while a lot of tubes come into the station get filled with people and leave again. After five hours he then realizes that Toby is missing so he gets up to look for him. But when he finds him he runs away onto the rails and Christopher follows him. Just in that moment there is another train approaching though and a man screams at Chris to get out of there but Christopher doesn´t listen because he wants to catch Toby. Just in the last moment Chris catches the rat and the man pulls him out because he doesn´t have any hand free because he is holding Toby.
Eight trains later Christopher finally has the courage to get on the train and drive towards his new home. When he gets out at the station the lady told him he still doesn´t know how to get to his Moms house though so he walks to a little shop and asks the employee how to get there. But he doesn´t tall him but wants to sell him a little London map for 2,95 pounds which Christopher buys. After 27 minutes he gets to his moms house but nobody is there so he decides to wait outside until somebody comes. A couple of hours later then he hears two people arguing and walking towards the house and he recognizes his Moms voice so he stands up and tells them that he waited for them. She can´t really believe it at first and comes to hug him but Mr Shears seems rather upset and worried that his Dad was there too and causes trouble. But when Christopher tells them that he came alone because he wants to live with them they calm down a little bit (except that Mr Shears obviously doesn´t want Christopher to live with them) and they go inside the house to get Chris something to eat and some clean clothes. Christopher then tells his Mom that he never answered her letters because he didn´t recieve them and his Dad told him she was dead. After he took a shower and put on some fresh clothes a policeman comes into the house to talk to him. He asks him whether he wanted to stay here and why he ran away. Christopher tells him why and that he didn´t want to go back to his Dads. The cop then says the situation was legally settled then and leaves. Christopher goes to sleep then but wakes up in the middle of the night because he hears people shouting downstairs. He also hears that one of the voices belongs to his Dad. After a while his Dad comes into the room and wants to talk to him. But when he talks to him Christopher doesn´t answer even when he apologizes and spreads his fingers out into a fan to touch his hands he doesn´t react. Tears start falling down his Dads cheek and he is taken out by a policeman Mr Shears called. After that Chris Mom tells him to go back to sleep so that´s what he does.

Chapter 179- 197

In that night Christopher decides to go to London to live with his Mom because that´s the only realistic possibility in his eyes. But befor he leaves he goes over to Mrs Alexanders house to ask her if she can take care of Toby while he is away but when she tries to convince him to stay and talk to his Dad he just turns around and runs back to his house to get some stuff together (like his Dads bank card, for which he knows the PIN number) and run away for good. He decides to take a train to London because he knows how everything works in a train station due to a little toy train station he used to play with as a child. The problem is just that he doesn´t know where the train station is so he decides to go to his school first and then ask Siobhan or somebody else. But when he gets there he sees his Dads van and keeps on walking because he is scared that his Dad might find him. So he is forced to ask a stranger where the train station is and after he still doesn´t know where it is for sure he starts to walk in a spiral until he finally finds it.
At first Christopher is overcharged with all the stuff going on in this big station so he sits down somwhere and thinks about some math problem to calm himself down. When he looks up again he sees a policeman who asks him whether everything was alright. He tells him that he wants to take the train to London to go live with his Mom and when he says that he doesn´t have a ticket yet the policeman shows him where the ATM is so that he get some cash and buy himself a ticket. After the woman in the ticket office told him which way to go and the policeman told him to call his Mom if there was any problem he goes where he was directed to and enters the train to London

Chapter 157-179

It takes six days until he can go into his Dads room again to find more about the letters and their author. He reads five more letters which totally convince him that those letters were really written by his Mom and that she wasn´t dead but that she ran away to London with Mr Shear and that his Dad has lied to him all along. Chrristopher then starts to feel really sick and curles up in a ball and has another blackout. He has his memory back when his Dad comes into the house and calls out his name but he still doesn´t move so his Dad finds him like that curled up on the bed with all the letters around. When he sees that he starts to curse and desperately excuses himself for not telling him the truth and tells him how sorry he was and that he didn´t know how else to explain it to him. Christopher still doesn´t say anything like he is in trance so his Dad takes him into the bathroom to wash him because he had thrown up. There he promises Christopher that he would never lie to him again and confesses that he killed Wellington. That happened because he had an affair with Mrs Shears after Mr Shears left with his wife but he had the feeling that she cared more about the dog than for him and his son. And then that night after they had a big fight and Christophers Dad stepped out the house the dog started to attack him and at this moment all the anger in him just exploded and he grabbed the garden fork and just sticked it into the dog.
After Christopher finds out about that he decides to run away because if his Dad killed Wellington he might as well kill him, too. So he waits for his Dad to fall asleep, packs some stuff together including his rat Toby and goes out to hide behind the garden shed until he has decided what to do next.

Chapter 149-157

Next Monday when Christopher goes to school again, Siobhan asks him wheter Dad had hit him and how it happened. But Christopher answers that he can´t remember because he had a blackout. When he gets home he starts to look for his book that his Dad threw away. After he doesn´t find it in the dustbin in the yard he starts to look for it in all the other rooms and finally in his Dads room. There he finds it in a box in the cupboard but he decides to leave it there for now so his father wouldn´t know he took it again. Just when he hears his Dads van pull into the driveway he sees a bunch of letters in the same box which are addressed to him. But because he doesnt have a lot of time he just takes one and puts the box back where it was so his Dad wouldn´t notice anything.
After dinner Christopher goes up to his room and reads the letter. It is addressed to him and signed with "Mum" which really confuses him because the date on the letter is 16.10.97 but at this point his Mom was already dead. In the letter "Mum" says sorry for leaving him and that she has a new job and that she lives in London now with Roger and that she hopes that he isn´t mad at her forever. Christopher can´t really make sense of that and decides to wait till he can go into fathers room again and read the other letters to find out wheter it was really his Mom or somebody sent the letter to a wrong address and meant to send it to another Christopher.

Chapter113-149

After school Christopher goes home and watches some videos untill his Dad comes home. But as soon as he comes in Chris remembers that he has forgotten the book (he is writing) on the kitchen table. His Dad gets really angry and shouts at Chtistopher because he told him so many times not to try to find out more about Wellingtons murder anymore. At one point he grabbs Christophers arm really hard and like we know he doesnt like that at all so he hits him and him and his Dad start to fight. Christopher then has a blackout for a short time which means he cant exactly remember what happend the last coupple of minutes and when he is conscious again he hears his Dad throw away his book outside.
The next day his father excuses for hitting him in the face and takes him to Twycross Zoo to see some animals. There he tells Christopher that he loves him and if something like that happens it´s only because he worries about him. Christopher understands that and spreads his fingers out in a fan to touch his Dads hand to tell him everything is good again (that´s what they do to say that they love each other because Christopher doesn´t like hugging etc.).

Chapter73-113

As Chris tells his Dad that he thinks Mr Shears killed Wellington, he tells him to not mention his name in this house anymore because the man was "evil". This makes Chris wonder even more but he promises his Dad to stop his detective work anyways.
A couple of days later Christopher meets Mrs Alexander on the street who tells him the real reason why his Dad doesn´t want him to talk about Mr Shears. That´s because he had an affair with Christophers Mom and his Dads wife which destroyed their marriage.
When Christopher shows the book to one of his teachers, Siobhan, the next school day(because she looks if he makes any writing or grammar mistakes) she asks him whether he was sad about the thing with his Mom and Mr Shears. But he answers No, because mother was dead and it would be stupid to be sad about something that isn´t there anymore.

Chapter47-73

Christopher finally decides to keep locking for Wellingtons murderer even though his Dad told him to stop sticking his nose into other people businesses. He plans on doing that with the help of "white lies" which is not exactly lying but leaving out the parts which could bother the other person (in christophers case his Dad) . At first he decides to talk to Mrs Shears and tell her that he is looking for the culprit but she threats him by saying she is going to call the cops again so he leaves after taking a look at her shed and recognizing the fork with which Wellington was killed.
The next saturday he continues his detective work and peays every house in his street a visit to question the people about the incident. But that doesn´t get him further so he comes to the conclusion that probably Mr Shears killed Wellington because he broke up with Mrs Shears and he could be hating her and wanting to hurt her. But he doesnt know a lot about him so he decides to find out more about him.

Narrative style and structure of the story

The story is written out of Christopher view, the main character created by the author Mark Haddon. That makes us really see what he thinks and feels as we get the information directly from him. Also it helps us to understand the Asperger´s Disorder because Christopher writes and explains thing as he sees them. His aim with the book is to create a murder mystery novel which one of the staff members at his school, Siobhan recommended him. As Christopher really like prime numbers, because they are easy to understand and simple, all the chapters are numbered with prime numbers (so it starts with chapter 2 then 3, 5, ... ).
The content of the chapters stagger between his story about the dead dog and his feelings and things that bother him.

Summary of the first couple of chapters ( 2 - 47 )

In the middle of the night, when Christopher likes to be on the street because he likes the feeling to be the only being on the planet, he sees Willington, the dog of a neighbor (Mrs. Shears) lying dead in a garden with a pitchfork sticking in him. As he picks him up to see what happened Mrs Shears comes out and screams because she thinks that Chris killed the dog. The cops are called and as one of them is asking Christopher questions and touches him, he hits him in the face because he wants him to not touch him. So he is arrested and taken to the police station where his dad picks him up and tells the police about his sons disorder so he doesn´t get punished. From there on Christopher decides to find out what happened to the dog and starts to play detective. His mom died two years ago because of a heart attack and he lives alone with his father who seems to have a hard time with him.

Christopher Boone and the Asperger´s Disorder

Christopher Boone is a 15 year old boy who suffers from a syndrom called the Asperger´s Disorder which is a"milder variant of Autistic Disorder". That means that he has problems recognizing facial expressions, likes to be alone ( social isolation) and can´t stand to be touched in any way. Furthermore affected people tend to concentrate all their attention to a certain field of interest, in Christophers case math, physics and astronomy, but lack knowledge in other more common things. Sometimes when there is too much information coming in at the same time it confuses him so he doesn´t know what to do and what to answer etc.
Later we find out that his biggest wish is to become an astronaut. Therefor he wants to take the A-Levels in math and physics and study at a good university. This really encourages him but is kind of hard to realizes because he goes to a school for handicapped children. His father tries everything to make it possible for him though.