I guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to thei

I guess the context is pretty important. Snow Crash is something of a deconstruction of the cyberpunk of the eighties, taking some of the genre’s tropes to their logical conclusion and subverting or inverting many others. It was one of the first influential works of the new wave of science fiction that came to be called post-cyberpunk (a genre notoriously hard to define beyond the obvious ”after cyberpunk”). The clear shift in narrative style after the prologue functions as a boundary of sorts, informing the reader that they are not in Kansas anymore. (Stephenson does this again, even more explicitly, in The Diamond Age!)