Christopher often looks up at the stars, especially in emotionally difficult situations. The stars make him feel small because the universe is so large, and they allow him to imagine that he’s out in space and there aren’t people all around him, which he finds comforting. The stars represent the fact that everything is much bigger than humankind and the social rules that fail Christopher—he remarks that humans will probably be extinct by the time the universe stops exploding from the Big Bang and all of the stars fall back towards each other. He also rejects the idea of constellations by saying they’re entirely arbitrary, thus stripping the stars of the stories that people have laid over them to make them more understandable to human minds. Christopher’s mind works in a different way. Furthermore, the stars symbolize his desire to be an astronaut and achieve everything that people have told him he can’t do.
Stars Quotes in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow...
But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur...
And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don’t know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away.
And that is the truth.