4 ideas
A narrator is dazzled by Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, a hero of the campaign against the Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians, famed for his splendid physique and rich voice. Everyone he asks about the general is interrupted just before finishing 'he is the man that was...'
Public reputation is kept alive by social talk that repeats the admiring surface and keeps cutting off before the defining fact. Each speaker assumes the listener already knows the rest, so the gap persists even though the truth is common knowledge. Look at what a celebrated figure's admirers never quite finish saying about them.
Smith keeps praising 'this wonderful age of invention,' which sounds like a citizen's civic enthusiasm until it turns out his own body is manufactured. He is recommending his suppliers. Enthusiasm for technological progress can be self-interested dependence on it, and the loudest advocates may be those most completely rebuilt by it.
Violence in the state's service can consume the hero's actual body, and what the public admires is a commercially fabricated replacement. The replacement exists only because a low-status servant reassembles it out of sight every morning. The imposing public figure depends on invisible, looked-down-upon labor that he himself treats with contempt.