I read a piece of fiction recently, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark Haddon. The book is written journal style from the perspective of an autistic 15 yr old boy. Mark Haddon is not autistic, but the back of the book claims he had worked with autistic children so he has second hand experience what the perspective of an autistic boy might be like. The book is very readable, and I got through it in two days, and I got the feeling that Mark wanted to paint what the world must look like through the eyes of someone with autism, and he wanted to humanize and make the audience sympathize with the main character as much as possible. That's what he WANTED To do, but what he actually does, I feel, is make the autistic main character as starkly unsympathetic as possible.
From screaming, hitting, and threatening people with no provocation, to going into long trances for hours at a time, to then brainlessly jumping into the path of an incoming subway train to chase after a rat, and then between all that going into detailed non sequitur explanations of random mathematical stuff... the idea is that these are the symptoms and characteristics of someone with autism, but they're not the actual first-hand perspective of an autistic, which was what the book was trying to be. At the very least, that's how it comes off; that the author is knowledgeable and empathizes, sure, but translating what he knows through his own perspective and then believing that's enough to create a convincing first person perspective, that comes off to me as grossly irresponsible and foolish. At the very best, he created a caricature that is a brainless burden on everyone around him and damages their lives just by existing. I'm aware that people with conditions like these can be an enormous hassle, I just felt that this book wasn't doing them any favors.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14955264 times)