V---2nd, riffing on "the inanimate"

[Mark Kohut]

What is not alive, right? All that surrounds Benny when he turns that first 
corner
alone..

Yet not just that. All that food in chap 13 is described as 'inanimate'.seeming 
to mean,
after Laura's observations, not being eaten, not shared as (comfort) food....

Dead (but mostly just never alive). Like a stone, ala Sartre's en soi, something
which is itself as is with or without our life....
 
Inanimate as in of the material world? Like goods and things? Cars....material
things as in consumer gods were growing in the 50s as mailer, galbraith, 
ginsberg
and others have told us.....
 
part of Benny's inanimate too?