Gately, the wraith, and the figurants — "The wraith pushes his glasses up…"
The wraith pushes his glasses up in the vaguely snivelling way of a kid that’s just got slapped around on the playground and says he personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to try to live.
Context
The doctrine turned autobiographical: the wraith was a figurant in his own family, "furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him." Carlisle gives the coinage a genealogy — JOI's own father called his parents "Furniture of the world" in the p. 168 garage monologue — so the dead man is describing himself in his father's vocabulary. The glasses-push is the same weak morose tic as the playground violin-kids Gately never protected.