The Characters
Two years before the beginning of the story, Henry Dorsett Case, the point-of-view character, was a “console cowboy.” He could directly interface his brain with the worldwide computer system, the matrix. He used his abilities as a data thief. When he attempted to double-cross his employers, they damaged with a toxic drug the portion of his brain used for the interface. At the beginning of the story, he is a street hustler and has killed three people. He is also a heavy drug user; he is twenty-four years old at the time of the novel.
Otherwise, the reader can divide most of the characters into criminals and victims. Linda Lee is the purest example of a victim. She is a twenty-year-old drug abuser and computer-game devotee.
Among the criminals are Peter Reveira, a performing holographic artist and sadist; 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, heir to the Tessier-Ashpool fortune, member of the idle rich, drug abuser, and thrill seeker; and even Molly, a mercenary whom people call a “razorgirl” because she has had retractable razor blades surgically implanted beneath her fingernails. She also has artificial eyes. At one time, Molly was a prostitute.
Armitage is interesting in that he is both a criminal and a victim. Under his real name of Willis, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces during the Three Week War between the United States and Russia. His superiors betrayed him when they ordered him on a mission that could not succeed. He survived, but at the cost of his sanity. He reconstructed himself as Armitage, criminal mastermind, but his hold on normalcy is tenuous.
Dixie Flatline, also known as Pauley McCoy, is a deceased “cyberspace cowboy” who got his nickname from the number of times he experienced brain death while connected to cyberspace. His memories and knowledge have been stored electronically, but this version of Dixie asks to be erased when the mission is completed. As a cyberspace cowboy he was a criminal, but as a data construct, he is a victim.
Wintermute and Neuromancer are artificial intelligences whose motivations are not entirely understandable to humans. Wintermute controls Armitage but also communicates directly with Case via virtual-reality versions of Case’s acquaintances. The purpose of Wintermute’s plot is to free himself of his bondage to Tessier-Ashpool and unite with Neuromancer, another artificial intelligence owned by that corporation. Wintermute is the decision maker and, behind the scenes, the true protagonist of the novel. Neuromancer appears to Case as a Brazilian youth and has a true personality.
Aerol, Maelcum, and Hideo are the only major characters motivated by duty. The elders of the Rastafarian space colony order Aerol and Maelcum to assist Armitage’s operation, and they do so at great personal risk. Hideo is a clone whose manufacturers have genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned him to be a bodyguard; the reader might question whether Hideo has ever had to make a moral choice.
Characters
In Neuromancer, a novel set in a crowded world, Gibson offers a rogue's gallery of characters from all levels of society, from the pimps, Panther Moderns, and criminals of Chiba City and the Sprawl to the wealthy denizens of Freeport and the Villa Straylight. All of Gibson's characters are damaged in some way, decadent and self-indulgent products of a world of accessible designer drugs, sex, and illegal trade in a variety of high-tech materials.
The central figures, Case and Molly, are members of a team assembled by Armitage, a technologically rebuilt version of Colonel Willis Corto, an officer betrayed and nearly killed in an assault on Russia. Armitage, under the direction of one of the...
(This entire section contains 833 words.)
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two powerful Tessier-Ashpool artificial intelligences, Wintermute, brings together Case, a cyberspace cowboy; Molly, a deadly razorgirl; Peter Riviera, a psychopathic entertainer with a talent for creating hallucinatory visions; the Finn, an expert in technological artifacts; and Maelcum, a Rasta tug pilot from Zion cluster, to attempt a break-in at the Villa Straylight on Freeport.
Case is a young, unwashed techno-artiste, a former console cowboy who has the ability to jack into the matrix and attack the databases he finds there. The opening of the novel finds Case in a death spiral in Chiba City, hustling stolen RAM and biologicals and flirting with annihilation by various criminals he has double-crossed. Case's brain has been sabotaged by a previous employer because Case became too greedy.
Case floats aimlessly through most of Neuromancer, bewildered, high, airsick, and inept, except when he is jacked into his deck. He is a reluctant participant, manipulated at various turns by Molly, Armitage, the Finn, and Wintermute. Plugged into Molly's sensorium through a simstim hookup, he sees himself through her eyes:
... a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat. He was looking at himself.
Case abandons his body, what he contemptuously calls his "meat" to risk brain death in the matrix like his hero the Dixie Flatline. Confused by the twists and turns of the Villa Straylight adventure and uncertain about the person or entity he should support, he deliberately makes the decision to turn away from the hallucination of his former girlfriend Linda Lee on the beach at Morocco in order to help Wintermute and the other T-A artificial intelligence Neuromancer. Ultimately Case is still uncertain about the consequences of the union, but Case has been the instrument through which that change has occurred.
Molly is the lethal razorgirl who is the muscle of the operation. She recruits and trains the Panther Moderns who assault Sense/Net to steal the construct of the Dixie Flatline, and she is the operative on the ground for the invasion of the Villa Straylight. Molly uses technological enhancement to intensify her skills. She sports silver eye cover implants, heightened neural responses, a digital visual read-out, and, in one of the novel's most startling images, retractable scalpel blades beneath her burgundy nails. All of these improvements, done in the black clinics of Japan, are expensive, Molly pays for her custom surgery by working as a "meat puppet," a prostitute, whose specialty happens to be snuffs. Her memory of her career as a puppet is blunted by the use of a neural cutout chip that keeps her from remembering, at least partially, her clients and their requests.
Molly is a survivor. Skilled and ruthless, cynical and hard-edged, she moves with a dancer's body and navigates the world's perils in spite of pain and a head full of tortured memories. Tellingly, she explains that because of her eye implants she is no longer able to cry through her tear ducts. Instead, she spits. It is vulnerability transmuted into contempt.
Molly and Case are surrounded by bizarre characters ranging from humans to machines, with gradations in between. The two AI's, Wintermute and Neuromancer, are the yin and yang of cyberspace. Wintermute is logic; Neuromancer personality. They assume human voice and form to communicate with Case and mastermind the entire enterprise. They motivate the human characters by playing on anger and hate. Armitage is a puppet of Wintermute, a man severely injured in a commando assault and rebuilt through Wintermute's powers. Peter Riviera is a drug-addicted psychopath whose special skill is his ability to project his own inner visions into images audiences can see. He creates nightmare theater. Maelcum is the Rastafarian tug pilot who serves as Case's sidekick and guide to space travel. He helps Case become accustomed to weightlessness, gives advice on the mission, and helps rescue Case from brain death in cyberspace. Other characters like the Finn, a fence; 3Jane, a cloned member of the Tessier-Ashpool family; the Dixie Flat-line, an artificial construct of famed cyberspace cowboy McCoy Pauley; and Lupus Yonderboy, the leader of the Panther Moderns, help populate the novel with an eccentric supporting cast.