Raw Shok and Modern Method: Child Consciousness in Flowers for Algernon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This essay situates child consciousness in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon in the legacy of child consciousness pioneered in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Not only do Christopher Boone and Charlie Gordon bear kinship with Huck and Maisie in replaying similar themes as they explore both protective freedoms and confining limits of the human mind, but they also exemplify how the method of the modern novel came to focus on child consciousness to mark environmental conditioning and broader social problems.