Both Uses of
gaunt
in
A Prayer for Owen Meany
- My grandmother, dripping wet—her usually flowing nightgown plastered to her gaunt, hunched body, her hair arrayed in its nightly curlers, her face thickly creamed the lifeless color of the moon—burst into my mother's room.†
p. 107.1
- Yet his face—his nose, the sockets for his eyes, his cheekbones, and the contours of his jaw—had the gaunt definition that one sees in the faces of sixteen-year-olds only when they are starving.†
p. 291.5 *
Definitions:
-
(1)
(gaunt) very thin and bony -- often from hunger or as though having been worn to the bone
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, gaunt can reference a place such as a landscape or a home, in which case it indicates that the place is bleak or barren.