47 pages • 1 hour read
William GibsonBurning Chrome
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 4 Summary: “The Belonging Kind”
Michael Corretti is a divorced, socially awkward linguistics professor who struggles to dress fashionably and relate to other people. He spends his free time going to bars, but he really prefers to avoid interaction even there. One night, Corretti meets a strange, attractive woman named Antoinette in a bar. To his surprise, she is interested in him despite his faltering attempt to talk to her. Corretti senses that something is off about Antoinette but is nevertheless intrigued. After they drink together and chat about country music for a few minutes, she abruptly leaves the bar. Corretti is compelled to follow her.
He watches as Antoinette’s appearance changes before his eyes: Her copper-colored hair becomes platinum blonde, and her dress shape alters. She enters a disco, with Corretti still following. He observes her drinking and dancing with another man, then pursues her through a crowd as her appearance once again transforms. Antoinette repeats the pattern, leaving the disco to go to another bar to talk to another man. Corretti manages to eavesdrop on part of their conversation, in which they casually discuss films. He is overwhelmed by how naturally the man and Antoinette seem to fit in at the bar but is unable to muster up the initiative to confront them. Corretti then follows Antoinette and the man as their appearances morph and they visit three more bars. At each location, no matter how casual or sophisticated, the strange pair easily fits in. After they leave the final bar, he follows them in a cab to a hotel, where they get out together. Disappointed, Corretti walks home.
In the weeks after that night, Corretti becomes obsessed with finding Antoinette, going from bar to bar in search of her. He falls behind in life, running up debt and losing his job. Finally, Corretti finds Antoinette again, and she is with the man he saw before. He silently gets near them, even sharing a cab with them. They once again enter a hotel. This time, Corretti follows them to their room. Though he is magnetically drawn to them, something about their appearance frightens him, and he runs away in terror.
Corretti gets a job in a warehouse, takes up residence in a boardinghouse, becomes a drunk, and thinks constantly about Antoinette. He quits his job one night and finds Antoinette in yet another bar. This time, they dance in a grotesque mating-like ritual. Immediately afterwards, Corretti chats with a bartender, for the first time feeling as though he is speaking “[l]ike a real human being” (60).
Story 4 Analysis
Gibson wrote “The Belonging Kind” with co-author John Shirley. “The Belonging Kind” is less focused on the implications of technology than many of Burning Chrome’s stories are. Nevertheless, it fits in alongside the stories written by Gibson alone, by exploring in depth the themes of countercultural societies and the questioning of what is real and what is imagined.
For example, Corretti seems as lonely and desolate a character as Parker in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.” Likewise, “The Belonging Kind” is ambiguous about whether Corretti truly sees Antoinette shift forms or if that is all in his head—just as the visions of the narrator in “The Gernsback Continuum” seem to be both real and hallucinations. Stylistically, Gibson and Shirley heighten this sense of ambiguity through vivid, magical language; Antoinette transforms into “color sliding and merging like oil slicks. [... Her dress] fell away entirely and lay in curling shreds on the pavement, shed like the skin of some fabulous animal” (48). The imagery of mutation and transformation along with comparisons to things like oil slicks and animal skins stress that Antoinette seems inhuman. Ironically, Corretti himself only feels “[l]ike a real human” after undergoing a grotesque mating-like ritual with Antoinette and her “soft-ruby tubes […], tendrils […] Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones” (60).
The sense that there are ever-present countercultures, often criminal, is also evident in “The Belonging Kind.” Antoinette and her companion are swindlers of a sort, pocketing what they can heist from unsuspecting victims in bars. In retrospect, even her interest in Corretti is superficial. After his life begins to unravel, Corretti himself turns to a degenerate life of drinking and counterfeiting money. However, Gibson and Shirley resist the urge to moralize in “The Belonging Kind,” always viewing even criminal behavior from a detached but empathetic perspective. The isolation people experience is pitied, but not the people themselves.
Related Titles
By William Gibson
