The Chosen Passage

"She dug a pack of Yeheyuan filters from an ankle pocket. He took it, let her light it with a red plastic tube. “You sleepin’ okay, Case? You look tired.” Her accent put her south along the sprawl, toward Atlanta. The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty. New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth. Her dark hair was drawn back, held by a band of printed silk. The pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map."

(William Gibson, "Neuromancer," page 9)

Re-read?



Why this passage?

I chose a short passage in accordance with Barthes' rejection of "structuring [the] text in large masses (11), and I feel that this particular passage contains a range of lexias which encompass a variety of codes and interactions between codes. Each part, 1 through 7, of this blog covers a separate lexia, with the relevant code or codes indicated underneath the passage fragment in square brackets.

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