AHWOSG-1

"...they had 'opened her up'--a phrase they used--and had looked inside, it was staring out at them, at the doctors, like a thousand writhing worms under a rock, swarming, shimmering, wet and oily--Good God!--or maybe not like worms but like a million little podules, each tiny city of cancer, each with an unruly, sprawling, environmentally careless citizenry with no zoning laws whatsoever.  When the doctor opened her up, and there was suddenly light thrown upon the world of cancer-podules, they were annoyed by the disturbance, and defiant.  Turn off.  The fucking.  Light."

That the doctor's had "opened up" mom, and that Eggers chose to phrase her surgery this way, allows reader's to see more than surgery.  The ambiguous phrase can be taken figuratively and we can see surgery as a sort of inspection of "mom's" character.  Egger's utilizes a nasty diction: "swarming, shimmering, wet...oily...unruly, sprawling."  Perhaps he does this to get the reader to associate bad things with the inside of "mom."

Egger's passage also characterizes the protagonist.  At this point, his mother is almost dead, yet he is able to joke and write metaphors that compare the tumor in her body to wriggling worms and podules.  These metaphors characterize the protagonist as a quirky and imaginative guy who either cannot express himself well, or has simply accepted the idea of his mother's sickness and is fine with it.  The last lines in italics suggest the latter or suggests anyway that the protagonist believes he is at the latter.  We know this because light is symbolic of knowledge and awakening, and the worms have a double significance as both cancer and the protagonist as he was once in his mother, in her womb.  As her child, when the light of knowledge was shed upon him he reacted crankily and angrily.  The italicized lines also suggests the protagonists assumes characters that are not his own and speaks through them.