Comparing Neuromancer And The Matrix

In 1949, audiences met Willy Loman in a play entitled Death of a Salesman. In 1984. readers met Case and Molly in a novel entitled Neuromancer. Finally, in 1999, viewers met Neo in a film entitled The Matrix. In a span of 5 decades, these three works drew the attention of millions and were admired for their unique approaches on bringing groundbreaking ideas of reality into view. By thorough examination of these three works, a common theme is discovered despite obvious differences of setting and medium. The shared theme is the definition of reality lying in the eye of the beholder, encircling the idea that reality is accepted in the form it’s believed to be. For all of these characters, they are convinced their world is complex. Thereby, they
Before readers get to know Case up close and personal, they are given a brief history of his past. Readers learn that Case stole from his employers and then received a punishment that made hacking into, you guessed it, the matrix, impossible for Case to ever commit again. When readers find Case in Chiba City, Japan, he is on a mission to discover a cure to rid him of his deprived, frustrating state, so he desperately searches the city’s black clinics. While Case does this, he eventually meets a woman named Molly who informs him of a man named Armitage who not only wishes to employ Case, but provide him with the cure granting him the ability to hack the matrix again (so long as Case complies with Armitage’s missions for him and Molly). Case and Molly are able to navigate between their everyday world to the mind-bending matrix through a complex series of “jacking” in and out. “He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacking into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.” (William Gibson, Neuromancer) Throughout the story, Case and Molly exert their skills above and beyond the physically possible, and are driven by their strong desire to reveal who Armitage is and devout professionalism. Case and Molly know their world to be complex and multidimensional, but it is the next character is the sole believer that his world is complex while everyone around him gently regards him as mentally unstable; this character is Willy from Death of a