The Curiosity of Things, Objects, and Subjects in Mark Haddon’s Novel of Incident

Abstract

I begin with a moment from Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) describing an encounter with things, in the form of an enumeration and a collection of sorts, where bodily, sensory, mental, and imaginative life are fused. Probing the porous boundaries, affinities, and frictions between contemporary subjects and objects, with bodies, special minds, and things, this essay develops novel approaches to notions of materiality, the object world, and embodied experience while also interrogating developments in the area of material culture, object studies, cultural phenomenology, and thing theory. Haddon and Boone (the narrator/protagonist) insisted on the material basis of all aspects of human existence and finally concluded that the subject can be materially transformed through interacting with objects.

Keywords

• Haddon
• Lists
• Thing Theory