Withering
Proulx writes, “Thursday night, balked by detours and construction, he was on the outskirts of Des Moines. In the cinder-block motel room he set the alarm, but his own stertorous breathing woke him before it rang…In the bathroom he mixed the packet of instant motel coffee and drank it black, without ersatz sugar or chemical cream. He wanted the caffeine. The roots of his mind felt withered and punky.” The metaphoric withering depicts the brain’s inactivity, which is attributed to the absence of caffeine. Consuming caffeine would cheer him up and make him lively.
Mare
Proulx writes, “He had looked the word up in the school dictionary, slammed the book closed in embarrassment, but the image was fixed for him (with the brassy background sound of a military march), blunt ocher tracing on stone, and no fleshly examples ever conquered his belief in the subterranean stony structure of female genitalia, the pubic bone a proof, except for the old man's girlfriend, whom he imagined down on all fours, entered from behind and whinnying like a mare, a thing not of geology but of flesh.” The metaphoric mare depicts the imagery of sexual intimacy which Mero visualizes in his mind. The image of the vulva , which he had thought to be a ‘ horseshoe’, elicits his imaginations about the sound which would emerge in the course of the intimacy.
