Neuromancer

Neuromancer opens with the line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). This is the first of many similes and metaphors that blur the line between technology and the natural world. Gibson’s language gives his setting a surreal feel; by linking the world of Chiba City with the fictional worlds created in media, he introduces the theme of The Artificial Nature of Modern Reality. In this human-created city, nature is practically invisible. Even the sky is reduced to technology.

Gibson’s style of narration frequently uses sentence fragments and stream of consciousness that create the same surreal effect, reminiscent of the choppy static on a dead channel. When Case witnesses Linda Lee’s death, Gibson does both:

Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.

Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran (38).

There is no complete sentence in these two paragraphs. Instead, there is series of artistic impressions, separated by periods at first and then jammed together with commas to give a more frantic pace as Case feels rising panic. This stylistic choice builds tension and increases the emotional impact of Linda’s murder. It also provides only fragmented images of Linda fleeing and a man gunning her down. This incomplete account creates an atmosphere in which the setting and events seem equally incomplete. When Case later encounters a version of Linda in the virtual world of the matrix, the detailed descriptions there make her continued life seem more realistic than the nightmare fragments of her death. In this way, Gibson’s use of language supports the novel’s blurring of easy distinctions between the “virtual” and “real” world.

Under these circumstances, it is therefore little wonder that Case is so desperate to recover access to cyberspace. However, Gibson also frames Case’s preference for virtual reality as emblematic of a troubled state of mind. Case is guarded and jaded, refusing to acknowledge that his relationship with Linda Lee goes beyond convenience despite clear indications of their affection for one another. This tendency to hold people at arm’s length coincides with his disdain for emotions and, ultimately, the “meat” that they originate in: the human body itself. Case’s desire to regain access to cyberspace is in this sense an attempt to flee his body and even his unique human identity—though, as the novel will show, the relationship between Personhood and Embodiment is too complex to admit this kind of easy escape. Regardless, the fact that Case experiences cyberspace as a “high” akin to drug use casts doubt on the healthiness of his affinity for virtual reality, as does the unthinking speed with which he accepts a dangerous job in the hopes of regaining access to that reality. With his cynicism and self-destructive tendencies, Case emerges as the kind of antihero that would become a staple of the cyberpunk genre.

Part 1 introduces two other characters who not only play significant narrative roles but who also facilitate the novel’s exploration of personhood in an advanced technological society: Molly and Armitage. At first glance, Molly’s body modifications—retractable blades beneath her nails and silver lenses covering her eyes—make her the less recognizably “human” of the two. The lenses in particular suggest artificiality by hiding a feature so commonly seen as central to human identity. However, Case notes that Molly’s lenses seem perfectly integrated into her body, suggesting compatibility of the human and the technological. By contrast, Armitage lacks obvious physical alterations, yet Gibson foreshadows that there is something not quite human about him; during their first meeting, Armitage’s eyes remind Case of “bleach” (an image that suggests the absence or erasure of the underlying self) and his body as a whole recalls a “statue” or inanimate “metal.”