Non-verbal communication is extremely important; on The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Communication as a process of sending and receiving information enables humans to share knowledge, attitudes, and skills. We first and uppermost associate communication with speech, but much depends on non-verbal signals, too. The social ecologist Peter F. Drucker stated that the most important thing in communication is what isn’t said, and I believe he meant non-verbal signals which can increase trust, clarity, and interest. While communicating in person, much of the message depends on intonation, tone of voice, facial expressions, body postures, and gestures. Non-verbal communication may take different forms illustrating, enhancing, or replacing the information expressed lexically. A good command of the body language helps send more accurate and informative messages to others, even if we fail to find the right words, and be able to read the signals that others are sending back to us. Moreover, it has always played a vital role not only in getting information across, but also in socialization.

Christopher Boone, the protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, tells us rather a sad story about how difficult it might be to live in a world of exceptionally alphabetical and digital messages, highly informative and unambiguous though they may be. He shows symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, and his condition affects his perception of the world and ability to interact. One of its shocking effects is that Christopher cannot read people’s faces or body language. This is part of a larger problem - he cannot empathize.

Christopher has a gross difficulty in understanding emotions that is why he finds it hard to grasp figurative language which he calls ‘metaphors’. For him, the simpler the wording is, the better - he would only operate with denotations, i.e. direct meanings of words. Even his vocabulary is very limited, to say nothing about non-verbal means of expression. A person’s face, the index of personality, may be less informative and interesting for Christopher than the clothes this person happens to be wearing (for instance, the man on the Tube who saved his life is referred to as ‘the man with little diamond patterns on his socks’). Small wonder that Christopher likes dogs better - they are much easier to deal with than humans are: ‘I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. ’ Christopher can understand some simplest clues such as his father’s shouting when angry or spreading fingers in a fan to salute just because he is used to them and remembers what they normally mean.

The tool that Christopher uses to see the sense of things is logic - very formal and correct, in fact, mechanical. Often, it helps him to discover and navigate the world (his grades for math are easily the best in the town); still more often, it doesn’t. His condition made him exceptionally gifted in math and other exact sciences, but socially unequipped. That is why

Christopher fails the investigation of Wellington’s murder. He regards intelligence and logic as a detective’s main instruments: ‘I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mystery and he says the world is Juli of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. But he notices them, like I do’.

Christopher believes himself to be very smart, and so he is, in a way. People with Asperger’s can demonstrate astonishingly high IQs (up to 180), and detectives have to be smart all right, but somehow that is not enough. It is social skills that Christopher lacks to interrogate eyewitnesses productively, work out the criminal’s psychological profile and analyze his motives.

One of the most memorable episodes of the book for me personally is when Siobhan, Christopher’s supervisor at school, tries to explain to Christopher the different meanings that can be expressed through body language.

‘Siobhan... says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose, it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry, and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you said just before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.’

I was very much impressed by this scene, because, I must admit, I had never given a second thought to the complexity of the phenomenon before. The book made me actually realize for the first time in my life how incredibly subtle and complex our non-verbal behavior is and how much we rely on it. We can subconsciously perceive, process, and transmit unbelievably vast amounts of information in a fraction of a second - an operation the most advanced computer in the world I am sure would never manage! And we, quite ordinary people with moderate IQs, don’t even have to learn how to do it - with us, this miraculous technology is inborn, there is nothing easier or clearer.

Well, with most of us. I do now feel for Christopher and people like him most sincerely for missing such vital clues which make our life and communication so rewarding and fruitful. This amazing book made me look anew at a lot of usual, yet astonishing aspects of life.

Yulia Noskova

‘Hangman’ in Black Swan Green

“We must all face our demons one day, Taylor, andfor you, that time is nigh” Ch. Hangman, p.35

An alter ego is a different version of oneself. Maggot, Unborn Twin, Hangman - Jason Taylor, the protagonist of the novel “Black Swan Green”, has a few of alter egos, and each of them is full of certain meaning. I am going to focus on the most difficult and significant one: Hangman. Why did David Mitchell put the character of Hangman as a central side of Jason’s personality? What is special about the relationships between Jason and Hangman? What is the point of this alter personality?

Jason Taylor is an out of ordinary boy. He differs from other school teenagers basically because of the psychological problem. He suffers from stammering and calls his stammer a ‘hangman’ with “pike lips, broken nose, red eyes ‘cause he never sleeps” (Ch. Hangman, p.31). It is interesting that through the language Jason expresses his attitude to the disease. “..it's his hands, not his face, that I really feel him by. His snaky