The Language of Difference: Saving Danny as a Neurodiverse Narrative

Abstract

To witness a neurodiverse narrative is to enter a world where silence speaks, gestures become language, and difference refuses to be contained within the borders of normal. Such texts disrupt the linearity of conventional storytelling, replacing it with fractured voices, pauses, and unconventional rhythms that mirror the lived realities of neurodivergence. Cathy Glass’s Saving Danny belongs to this tradition of narrative difference, where the child’s struggles are not simply deficits to be corrected but signs of an alternative subjectivity. By tracing Danny’s journey through the lens of neurodiversity, the narrative invites readers to reimagine care, identity, and belonging beyond the confines of normative expectations. It affirms that literature does not merely represent lives but also reshapes the way we understand what it means to be fully human. Contemplating Cathy Glass’s Saving Danny through the lens of neurodiversity, positioning the text as a narrative of difference that disrupts normative assumptions about childhood, family, and care. By foregrounding Danny’s behavioral struggles and communicative barriers, the narrative stages can be read as a semiotics of neurodivergence, where silence, tantrums, and fragmented speech acquire symbolic weight. This paper puts forth three innate aspects and intrinsic feature in determining the text as neurodivergent text. Semiotics of neurodivergence is the first quientessential trait in determining the narrative as neurodivergent. Parenting as praxis within the shades of support, structure and empathy is the second integral dimension in marking Danny the leading role as cognitively diverse kid. The third defining attributes in the language of difference is the polyphony and presence that reframes the neurodiverse child. Moreover, this discourse unravels into the realization that the narrative functions as a neurodiverse text one that decenters the normative child and instead privileges multiplicity, difference, and the transformative potential of care.