Neuromancer Frameworks

In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the reader is immersed in a world of cybernetic fantasy. Gibson uses extensive metaphor and imagery to create a place where the lines between cyberspace and reality are nonexistent. This represents the main character’s, Case, own psychological psychosis- his inability to tell the difference between what happens in the matrix and what happens tangibly.
Gibson frequently compares the city to the matrix, drawing the two together to insinuate that the two, one subsiding in reality and one subsiding in cyberspace, are virtually indistinguishable. The metaphor in “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” (51) liken “clusters and constellations of data” to “city lights”. Analogies like these meld the two worlds together.
Cyberspace is also set parallel to the mind; the cybernetic matrix an equivalent to the brain’s matrix. In the quote,
“He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him in a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” (55)
Gibson makes the similarities of the cyberspace matrix and the human sensorium stark, even going as far to say that the matrix was a simplification of the mind instead of a separate entity.
While comparisons between cyberspace and reality are fine, the protagonist is plagued by one of the differences. Case initially found himself trapped in his flesh when his neurons are damaged by unhappy clients. He was, at least until his neurons are repaired by a later character, no longer able to be a cyberspace cowboy because of this. Gibson uses frequent references to “flesh” to capture Case’s helplessness. “A field of flesh” (46) and “flesh of lost summers” (48) were such quotes that exemplifies this reoccurring motif.