Soru

Directions: The passage below is an excerpt from a short story. Read the passage carefully and then choose the best answer to the question.

Gregory watched the tide-charts with the same silent devotion he had paid them for forty years, though the harbor itself had long since ceased to harbor anything but the sleek, fiberglass hulls of yachts he did not own. Every morning, he walked the length of the wooden pier, counting the rotting pine planks that groaned beneath his boots, a familiar scale of decay. The new marina rose to the east, all steel pilings and tinted glass, reflecting a sterile blue sky that seemed entirely disconnected from the grey salt spray of his youth. The town council had offered to buy his slip, calling it an "eyesore of historical interest," but Gregory had simply turned his back. He knew the precise depth at which the sandbar shifted under the autumn gales; he knew how the northeaster rattled the loose shingles on the fish house. To leave would mean admitting that the water could exist without him, or worse, that he could exist without the water. So he stood at the pier's end, a weathered piling himself, rooted in the muck while the tides of progress washed around his ankles.

In the final sentence of the passage, the narrator's comparison of Gregory to a "weathered piling" primarily serves to emphasize which of the following?