The Dystopian Future of William Gibson's Neuromancer

The Dystopian Future of Neuromancer

In reading a text like this one can look at it through the formalistic approach and gather aspects on different perspectives. In HCAL it instructs a reader to analyze a specific text by seeing the setting, certain styles, imagery, form, and texture. In William Gibsons book Neuromancer all these approaches can be seen. The novel takes place in the future and how Gibson portrays it will be. Every place is dark and gloomy with an illusion of dystopia; despair and unhappiness. Gibson's structure is very hard to follow, such as how he is repetitive with the description of people and the color pink.

Neuromancer, a book that brings the belief of the future to life, speaks of the use of technology and how advanced it will be. Gibson illustrates a place of dystopia, where everything is dark and full of despair. There seems to be no control over people and who they kill. The place were all dystopia occurs is in cyberspace. The opening line seems to be Gibson's way of preparing the reader for what is to come; "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."(Gibson 3) Here one sees the imagery that Gibson uses. He begins by bringing death and dismay in to the readers mind. One can picture a television that is black and fuzzy because the channel is not tuned in, the way the sky is. This is nothing like our sky; blue and bright. Rather like that of a gloomy rainy day, black and not appealing. Further in the book Gibson talks where the people live and sleep, places called "coffins." He describes the coffin's size, "the r...

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...epetition of the color pink to describe things, brings a sort of humanistic quality into the work. It makes one see that all though the characters in the story are living in cyberspace, they do have human qualities.

To approach this book from all these angels brings a new outcome of the novel. Gibson sets up the book from the beginning with the scene of dystopia, and continues it throughout the entirety of the novel. The greatest image of dystopia I found in this novel, was all the deaths that occur without a second thought about it. Using the formalistic approach to pick out these certain images in the novel, helps the reader see what exactly is going on. With the words that Gibson uses puts a pictured image in the readers mind as they go along; the image of DYSTOPIA.