(From A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe, Part I, Aberfan, chapter 11)
And then, at the dinner dance, with that kiss, he dared to believe they had a future. But Aberfan has scooped out the core of him, stretched it thin and catapulted it into the wild blue yonder. Maybe that's why he's here , to try and get himself back.
What do you understand by "stretched it thin" in this context? I take it to mean something like "the core of him was stretched like a string or an elastic band". What does the author want to say with this figurative language?
Best Answer
To "stretch something thin" is to, in some figurative way, use more than something is capable of. One could stretch thin their time, or money, or attention, or other resources, implying that they don't actually have enough to cover everything in an ongoing fashion. It implies that too much is being asked, and that the quality of whatever is being stretched thin suffers.
This passage states that Aberfan "stretched thin the core of him", implying that the Aberfan disaster was a great emotional burden to bear. It did not outright break him, but the passage connotes a sense of being close to it.