"Jon," and a Curious Incident

Many of the stories we've read in class stick out for me as having a particular feature that is memorable, one that isn't necessary the interesting events that occur. "The Things They Carried" has a strange, repetitive style. "Teddy" presented interesting ideas about existence, although I felt the actual plot was ultimately lacking. In this vein, the story of "Jon" is triumph of distinctive voice. Jon's naive, yet poignant voice reminded me of Mark Haddon's A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a novel.

In Curious Incident, we also follow a first-person narrator, Christopher. Like Jon, Christopher's ability to communicate with others is different then we might consider normal, and like Jon, they often find themselves unable to express themselves to others, Jon because he lived all his life isolated in a product-testing faculty, and with chips embedded in his brain, while Christopher has some form of unspecified autism, unable to read facial expressions, lie, or interpret metaphors-- he cannot form an emotional reading of a situation. Contrast the following excerpt from Curious Incident, where Christopher has just discovered a murdered dog, to when Jon learns the truth about his parents, and note the matter-of-fact tone in both:

"Let go of the dog," she shouted. "Let go of the fucking dog for Christ's sake."
I put the dog down on the lawn and moved back 2 meters.
She bent down. I thought she was going to pick the dog up herself, but she didn't. Perhaps she noticed how much blood there was and didn't want to get dirty. Instead she started screaming again.
I put my hands over my ears and closed my eyes and rolled forward till I was hunched up with my forehead pressed onto the grass. The grass was wet and cold. It was nice. 

From "Jon":

Because tell the truth that thing with my mom had freaked me out, it was like my foundation had fallen away, like at LI 83743 for Advil, where the guy’s foundation of his house falls away and he thunks his head on the floor of Hell and thus needs a Advil, which the Devil has some but won’t give him any.
As he left, Dove unhit Pause, and I had time to note many things on that video, such as that lady’s teeth were not good...

Like how Jon notices how the lady's teeth weren't good in the middle of the dramatic reveal, Christopher makes a completely out of place interpretation that the woman's actions were out of a desire for cleanliness. A smaller detail is the unconventionally spelled out "2," and in Curious Incident as a whole, the chapters are numbered to be prime. This evokes the numerical Location Indicators that Jon references; for both of these characters, these numbers are an intimate part of their lives.

For Jon and Christopher, their handicaps on communicate create obstacles for them. For Jon, he cannot even imagine conveying emotions to Carolyn without the benefit of having a shared language of the Location Indicators, and Christopher is often discriminated against and dismissed as a "spazz" because of his condition. Yet, both of these narrators exposed to me a new perspective, precisely because of the handicaps that their voices convey, and both of the fictional worlds they reside are more interesting because of their perspective. Imagine "Jon," for example, told in the stiff style of Brave New World, and for those who have read Curious Incident, imagine the book retold from the Dad's perspective. A certain amount of the conflict directly arises from these distinctive voices, which, in our conflict-ridden world, leads to the question:

Are we really that much more successful at communication than Christopher and Jon are able to be?