Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (Language and Grammar)
The can of foreign Coke has left a ring on his forehead that’s colder than the feverish skin around it, and Gately tries to concentrate on the cold of the ring instead of the dead cold total ache on his whole right side—DEXTRAL—or the sober memory of his mother Mrs. Gately’s ex-significant other […]
Context
The flood's first aftershock: mid-sentence, in Gately's own free-indirect narration, his right side becomes — DEXTRAL — in the flood's caps, a word Gately has no way of owning. The wraith's vocabulary is now loose in the prose itself; by p. 839 it has settled in lowercase ("the dextral flare"), which is the source-marker for over-lexical moments in Gately's narration elsewhere in the book.