HW due May 7th

While I was reading the angle I was keeping in mind was how Gibson uses detailed descriptions to emphasis or portray certain moods or settings.

Pg. 72 “Smith sat very still, staring into the small brown eyes of death” – The sight of sitting very still can calm shows the seriousness and intensity of this situation.

Pg. 82 “[Molly] staring out the train window at blasted industrial moonscape, read beacons on the horizon” - This description depicts a lonely nature less world dominated by technology with molly is looking out into.

Pg. 85 “His eyes were a dark brown that matched the shade of his vey short military-cut hair”
-Gibson uses this man’s neatly short cut hair and dark eyes to represent what this man might possibly be like.

Pg. 86 “The right side of the street was lined with miniature scrapyards” – I like this quote cause Gibson’s descriptions does a nice job of letting the reader know exactly what kind of communities and society they are in.

Pg. 88 “It’s a horse, man. You ever see a horse?” – This quote uses descriptive writing to tell the reader how the characters feel instead of just simply telling them.

Pg. 88 “The alley was an old place, too old, the walls cut from blocks of dark stone” - The rest of this quote also does a good job a describing the setting almost to the point where the reader might be able to recognize smell.

Pg. 99 “Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon” – Gibson uses familiar phrases to help describe a very unique and distant place that helps the reader connect.

Pg. 120 “The air here smelled of running water and flowers” – This is a nice quote of Gibson using the description of the setting to help depict the feelings of a character.

Pg. 129 “…until it vanished behind the band of the Lado-Acheson” – This quote describes the lack of “nature” in their society and it plays off in the emotions and attitude of Case.

Pg. 130 “…Case thought, watching the boy’s brown eyes” – The description the physical characteristics of the young boy are used to depict his personality without ever literally saying anything.

When I first started reading Neuromancer I immediately picked up on one pattern involving the setting, and that was this place was a very depressing and miserable place to be. As I continued to read further I started noticing this reoccurring theme not only in the description of the settings, but in also the characters emotions, which in result intensified the description of the setting that much more. For example, Gibson writes, “But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled up in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there”. Even in this man’s subconscious, his dreams, he is still overwhelmed by the pressures he faces in his everyday life, and it seems that even in his dreams he can’t escape the miserable coffin like hotel that he calls home. The mere fact that Gibson deliberately writes that the mattress is squeezing between his fingers is proof that Gibson is trying to emphasis the fear and misery that this man has to deal with. This truly sounds like whoever this man is he has found hell on earth.

Another passage that I found very descriptive of the “unique” setting that this novel takes place is when Gibson writes about the city and what the surroundings are like, and he says, “Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky”. I like this passage for two reasons. The First reason being is that it is so descriptive; it even goes into detail the lighting Case has to live in.The second reason is being that it is that the description is very figurative. Does the fact that he lives nearest to the port suggest anything about is spiritual standings? Or is a representation of his economical status? All sorts and kinds of questions can be asked about the following passage. And the detailed description of the setting makes it seem as if the passage becomes even more open to interpretation, which I found enjoyable.