THE POETICS OF THE CHARACTERS’ INNER WORLD IN “SPOOK COUNTRY”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47390/SPR1342V5I12Y2025N46Keywords:
character interiority, focalization, free indirect discourse, narrative ethics, digital realism.Abstract
This article examines the poetics of representing the characters’ inner world in William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), the second novel of the so‑called Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy. Drawing on narratology (Genette’s focalization), the poetics of consciousness (Dorrit Cohn), narrative ethics (James Phelan), and Bakhtinian dialogism, the study shows how Gibson’s late‑style “digital realism” renders interiority via free indirect discourse, perceptual montage, attention‑mapping, and material interfaces (GPS art, AR overlays, logistical routes). In comparison with Pattern Recognition, Zero History, and earlier cyberpunk (Neuromancer), as well as Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The Diamond Age and Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Spook Country emerges as a distinctive model of interiority—neither romantic‑confessional nor algorithmically diagrammatic, but networked and ethic‑pragmatic—where vigilance, tracking, data‑gathering, and doubt sediment into habits of mind. Spook Country models inner life as a distributed perceptual‑ethical system in which styles of attention are themselves ethical stances.
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