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Chapter 197
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing Up
Trust
Truth, Love, and Safety
Logic vs. Emotion
Perspective and the Absurdity of the World
Summary
Analysis
Christopher says that people believe in God because they want some way to explain how everything on earth came to exist. Christopher, however, thinks it’s only luck that there’s life on earth, and not on other planets. For life to come into existence, there has to be replication (making copies through reproduction), mutation (small changes in the copies), and heritability (the changes being passed on to offspring). People don’t believe that the complex components of life can come about by chance, but they in fact come about through evolution. Furthermore, religious people think that humans are superior to other animals, but humans will eventually evolve into something better, or else will go extinct.
Christopher again exhibits his dislike of anything supernatural or mythic. He pins down the very existence of life, one of the most seemingly mysterious phenomena, with scientific principles. Though other people often see themselves as different or better than Christopher, they all came about through science. Christopher seems to find some satisfaction in the fact that in the long run, humans who think they’re great probably aren’t so great. He also expresses his affinity for animals again by defending them against humans’ superior attitude.
Themes
