Pattern Recognition (novel) - Style and Story Elements

Style and Story Elements

The novel uses a third-person narrative in the present tense with a somber tone reminiscent of a "low-level post-apocalypticism". Cayce's memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks, which briefly use the future tense, are told by Gibson as "a Benjaminian seed of time", as one reviewer calls it, because of the monistic and lyrical descriptions of Cayce's relationship to objects with the attacks in the background. Two neologisms appear in the novel: gender-bait and mirror-world. Gibson created the term mirror-world to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets. Gender-bait refers to a male posing as a female online to elicit positive responses. The term coolhunter, not coined by Gibson but used in the marketing industry for several years, is used to describe Cayce's profession of identifying the roots of emerging trends.

The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif representing a break with the past with Cayce's father, who disappears during the attacks, as the personification of the 20th century. Gibson viewed the attacks as a nodal point after which "nothing is really the same". One reviewer commented that in "Gibson's view, 9-11 was the end of history; after it we are without a history, careening toward an unknown future without the benefit of a past—our lives before 9-11 are now irrelevant." Cayce's search for her father and Damien's excavation of the German bomber symbolize the historicist search for a method to interpret people’s actions in the past. Coming to terms with her father’s disappearance may be interpreted as a requiem for those lost to the 20th century, something that may have been influenced by Gibson coming to terms with the loss of his own father.

The film clips are a motif used to enhance the theme of the desire to find meaning or detect patterns. They are released over the internet and gain a cult following, in the same way that the lonelygirl15 videoblog gained an international following in 2006. Corporate interest in the footage is aroused by its originality and global distribution methods. The characters debate whether the anonymous clips are part of a complete narrative or a work in progress, and when or where they were shot. This enigmatic nature of the footage is said to metaphorically represent the nature of the confusing and uncertain post-9/11 future. The author Dennis Danvers has remarked that the footage being edited down to a single frame is like the world compressed into a single novel. The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to Pattern Recognition written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London, Tokyo, and Moscow in 2002.