‘Although the footage segments are not numbered, many who follow their release believe they should be assembled to create a narrative, although in what order remains a matter of intense debate, as does whether they should constitute a narrative at all. The articulated narrative, of course, is the plot built around the ekphrasis that creates the footage through verbal representation.

(…)

[PR is a] narrative in which, for nearly three hundred pages, nothing much happens. The effect of delaying all the decisive action until the end is to envelop the reader in an atmosphere of murky apprehension, searching for the pattern amidst a welter of precisely drawn details that do not quite cohere into plot.

(…)

As the action jumps from New York City to London, Tokyo to Moscow, computer-mediated communication is pervasive, from the F:F:F website to email and electronic music to the creation and rendering of the footage. Representing the cognisphere in which, as a massmarket print novel, it is also enmeshed, Pattern Recognition brings to conscious articulation the patternwe are thereby enabled to recognize: the crucial role of code in allowing trauma to be released from the grip of obsessive repetition, emotional disconnection, and aconscious reenactment so that it can achieve narrative expression. In this sense Pattern Recognition is a self-referential fiction, for its ability to create a narrative about creating a narrative through code reflexively points back to the role of code in its own production as a material artifact. At the same time, the possibility that the footage, compelling as it is, may not finally be a narrative at all hints at the vulnerability of narrative at a time when Lev Manovich, among others, asserts that the database has displaced narrative as the dominant cultural form. The pprehension that permeates the novel thus operates on two levels at once: as the visible trace of trauma that bodies experience in the text and as the text’s latent fear that the penetration by code of its own textual body could turn out to be traumatic for the print novel as a cultural form.’

— N. Katherine Hayles, 2006. ‘Traumas of Code’, Critical Enquiry 33, pp. 144-147