Chewing / being devoured

Minds, cities, and the Show all chew people in this motif — the Disease rendered as a mouth. It appears early, when depression's stasis "allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart" (pp. 68-78), and it returns as something audible: "You can almost hear his Disease chewing away inside his head, feeding" (pp. 270-281). The Substance itself gets "a ravening maw, and canines down to here," and the anhedonic ceiling threatens to eat the man beneath it. The motif sharpens into a distinction about the self at pp. 657-661, where players get chewed up but there may be "a place inside that can't be chewed" — with the forward-looking question of whether Hal, in the book's opening chapter, has finally gone to that unchewable place. What the image carries is the felt experience of being consumed from inside, and the faint hope of a core the maw can't reach.