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The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure
Theoretically, you could find this type of humor anywhere. But only a topflight science-fictionist, we thought, could have written this story, in just this way. . . . Start It was quite by accident I discovered this incredible invasion of Earth by lifeforms from another planet. As yet, I haven't done anything about it; I can't think of anything to do. I wrote to the Government, and they sent back a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses. Anyhow, the whole thing is known; I'm not the first to discover it. Maybe it's even under control. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality", writes science fiction author Charles Platt.
18 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1953
About the author
Philip K. Dick
1,758 books20.9k followersPhilip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 242 reviews
April 13, 2019
First published in Science Fiction Stories (1953), “The Eyes Have It” is perhaps the shortest of Philip Dick’s short stories. Although on the surface it appears to be a mere bagatelle, it is also a sophisticated exploration if the idomatic structures of the English language.
It is in the form of a monologue by a narrator who wishes to warn us about an imminent alien invasion. He appears to be paranoid, but claims to have evidence, which has found in the text of a novel he recently found abandoned on the bus. However, when he begins to explain his “evidence,” the reader realizes that the narrator is indeed paranoid, and that his paranoia is result of interpreting the metaphors of idiomatic English literally.
Initially, it is the reference to eyes which disturb him, how they “slowly rove about the room,” how they “move from person to person,” until they “fasten” on one. Soon he includes reference to arm, legs, brains as well, building a nightmare vision of fragmented creatures composed of human body parts. The results of his mediations are ridiculous, of course, but very amusing. And more than a little creepy too.
At first this seems nothing more than an amusing story, litter better than a joke. Still there is something here that unsettles me. No, it is not the threat of an alien invasion. It is the fragmented vision of the human person, a dark dream half-asleep in our everyday speech—that is what sticks with me.
March 5, 2019
So... somebody noticed those weird, disembodied eyeballs decades before I was even born! Whew. I'm glad I wasn't just imagining it.
This story is kind of hilarious to readers like me who can't figure out why certain writers seem to enjoy putting their characters' eyeballs through a literary version of CrossFit. Here's an excerpt from a review I wrote back in 2009, Blue Moon by Alyson Noël:
The Eyes Have It takes this premise even further, and the narrator gets absolutely freaked out by the mention of people giving their hearts and taking each other's hands. English truly is a strange language; it's a wonder non-native speakers ever learn the nuances!
This is a short, but enjoyable, story. I think I may have read some Philip K. Dick years ago, but I don't recall ever reading The Eyes Have It. I kind of wish I'd done so sooner; now I don't feel so alone in being annoyed by acrobatic eyeballs in literature.
Quotable moment:
This story is kind of hilarious to readers like me who can't figure out why certain writers seem to enjoy putting their characters' eyeballs through a literary version of CrossFit. Here's an excerpt from a review I wrote back in 2009, Blue Moon by Alyson Noël:
... the word you're looking for is "gaze"... not "eyes". When I see eyes grazing, raking, resting, and roaming, my mind conjures up strange images of freed eyeballs doing all kinds of things they really shouldn't be doing. How exactly do eyes rake something, anyway? That sounds painful.
The Eyes Have It takes this premise even further, and the narrator gets absolutely freaked out by the mention of people giving their hearts and taking each other's hands. English truly is a strange language; it's a wonder non-native speakers ever learn the nuances!
This is a short, but enjoyable, story. I think I may have read some Philip K. Dick years ago, but I don't recall ever reading The Eyes Have It. I kind of wish I'd done so sooner; now I don't feel so alone in being annoyed by acrobatic eyeballs in literature.
Quotable moment:
...his eyes slowly roved about the room.
Vague chills assailed me. I tried to picture the eyes. Did they roll like dimes? The passage indicated not; they seemed to move through the air, not over the surface. Rather rapidly, apparently. No one in the story was surprised. That's what tipped me off.
January 16, 2014
The inside of Philip K Dick's brain is an amazing place.
April 12, 2021
LitReading Classic Short Stories
"I have absolutely no stomach for it."
"I have absolutely no stomach for it."
August 1, 2020
Taking English phrases literally can lead to craziness.
June 17, 2018
How to Read a Story?
The Eyes Have It is probably as deep as it is short, which would make it square in terms of geometry, but applying our everyday conceptions to PKD means one has got another think coming.
In this little story, we have got an unnamed first-person narrator who found a book on a bus and starts reading it. Seemingly harmless sentences like “his eyes moved from person to person”, containing cliché metaphors, set off the alarm bells in the narrator’s head because he takes them as evidence of an invasion of aliens who, unlike us (?), are able to disintegrate their bodies in unsettling ways. He even writes to the government about this invasion, but they send him back “a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses”. Later, after continued reading sessions of the book outside his house, i.e. his usual frame of reference, our narrator is so wrought up that he seeks solace in a game of Monopoly with his family, playing with “frantic fervor” and not wanting to know anymore about the silent invasion going on, which is probably “under control”, anyway.
One may treat this tale as a humorous whim set into words by the author, but in a way, the story kept my mind busy and me wanting to get my head around it – oh dear! that may make me an alien to! So, my first idea was that PKD might have wanted to give his readers a hint that they should look beyond the surface when reading a story and not cling to the immediate meaning of the words and sentences like the narrator of The Eyes Have It does. If you take everything at face value, you might not get near the meaning of things and just treat literature as a commodity to be consumed without creating a deeper effect on the reader.
This does not really work, however, because our narrator is deeply affected by what he reads, so much so that he seems to become unhinged about it and that the government sends him a manual on repairing and maintaining frame [!!! i.e. Keep within the frame of your ordinary life and do not look behind the curtain!] houses. Maybe, there is really some truth about the invasion he reads of, then? But who are these aliens, whose bodies seem to have no coherence anymore? Could this be a reference to ourselves, to the kind of people we have become in a modern consumer society, where individuals are just hoses to pump goods through? We live and we work in different places, we disintegrate into various roles, here we are modern parents that have to meet certain standards of how to bring up our kids, there we are assembly line workers (basically hands), or bookkeepers (basically calculators), or salespeople (basically smiles), here we are patiently listening partners (basically ears), and above all, we are consumers (basically stomachs and intestines).
When have we last felt whole about a thing?
Our narrator gets a glimpse at this insight by no longer taking the everyday phrases for granted – it is quite significant that he does not stumble over intricate and original metaphors, but only about the dead ones most of us would not even notice as instances of figurative language – and looking beneath them, letting his eyes have “it”, at the mechanisms of language, but the truth, as it presents itself to him, is too tough a nut to crack for him, and so he joins his family, frantically playing … Monopoly of all games.
Hmmm, maybe it’s just a funny story after all?
The Eyes Have It is probably as deep as it is short, which would make it square in terms of geometry, but applying our everyday conceptions to PKD means one has got another think coming.
In this little story, we have got an unnamed first-person narrator who found a book on a bus and starts reading it. Seemingly harmless sentences like “his eyes moved from person to person”, containing cliché metaphors, set off the alarm bells in the narrator’s head because he takes them as evidence of an invasion of aliens who, unlike us (?), are able to disintegrate their bodies in unsettling ways. He even writes to the government about this invasion, but they send him back “a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses”. Later, after continued reading sessions of the book outside his house, i.e. his usual frame of reference, our narrator is so wrought up that he seeks solace in a game of Monopoly with his family, playing with “frantic fervor” and not wanting to know anymore about the silent invasion going on, which is probably “under control”, anyway.
One may treat this tale as a humorous whim set into words by the author, but in a way, the story kept my mind busy and me wanting to get my head around it – oh dear! that may make me an alien to! So, my first idea was that PKD might have wanted to give his readers a hint that they should look beyond the surface when reading a story and not cling to the immediate meaning of the words and sentences like the narrator of The Eyes Have It does. If you take everything at face value, you might not get near the meaning of things and just treat literature as a commodity to be consumed without creating a deeper effect on the reader.
This does not really work, however, because our narrator is deeply affected by what he reads, so much so that he seems to become unhinged about it and that the government sends him a manual on repairing and maintaining frame [!!! i.e. Keep within the frame of your ordinary life and do not look behind the curtain!] houses. Maybe, there is really some truth about the invasion he reads of, then? But who are these aliens, whose bodies seem to have no coherence anymore? Could this be a reference to ourselves, to the kind of people we have become in a modern consumer society, where individuals are just hoses to pump goods through? We live and we work in different places, we disintegrate into various roles, here we are modern parents that have to meet certain standards of how to bring up our kids, there we are assembly line workers (basically hands), or bookkeepers (basically calculators), or salespeople (basically smiles), here we are patiently listening partners (basically ears), and above all, we are consumers (basically stomachs and intestines).
When have we last felt whole about a thing?
Our narrator gets a glimpse at this insight by no longer taking the everyday phrases for granted – it is quite significant that he does not stumble over intricate and original metaphors, but only about the dead ones most of us would not even notice as instances of figurative language – and looking beneath them, letting his eyes have “it”, at the mechanisms of language, but the truth, as it presents itself to him, is too tough a nut to crack for him, and so he joins his family, frantically playing … Monopoly of all games.
Hmmm, maybe it’s just a funny story after all?
December 18, 2016
Geeky Paranoid Protagonist playing literally with the workings of English words. Quite funny and enjoyable wearing his shoes.
October 30, 2022
Nice wordplay
December 31, 2022
A strange little short story in which a man reads about an alien invasion in a book.
March 23, 2016
It takes me quite a while to figure out what's going on and when I get his trick my mind goes like, "AWWWWWWWW!"
November 13, 2017
Metonymy at the outer limits. Also, the amorphous structure and expectations of some science fiction.
June 6, 2018
Very short whimsical piece. In the hands of Pratchett it would be an amusing episode of word play, with PKD it is resonant of mental illness. Purely down to my reading history.
June 15, 2014
When I first read this early story of Philip K. Dick I found it pretty silly, but on reflection it is a perfect illustration of the interplay of alienation and estrangement that I find interesting in much science fiction. I recently listened to an interview with PKD where he claimed that one of his books was released as a mainstream novel in hardcover, and as a science fiction novel in paperback. The duality of status confirmed the duality of language that this text already highlights.
The story (text here, audio here) seems a little frivolous at first, but it is a good test case for the definition of science fiction as cognitive estrangement. Here the sense of wonder is induced in the hero as reader of what may well be an ordinary novel, but where he interprets literally certain habitually figurative expressions. Because the author is Philip K. Dick we are left with a certain doubt at the end: is the narrator just naive, perhaps even stupid, in taking words literally, at face value, or is he a step more "meta" than us, understanding what we have been trained to regard as second degree metaphorical discourse as in fact conveying literal truth?
I am reminded of Zizek's analysis of John Carpenter's film THEY LIVE. A homeless tramp discovers a pair of glasses that when donned reveals a world of alien invasion hidden beneath the superficial illusion of normality. Zizek claims that the normal perception is "ideology" and that the glasses serve to remove our ideological filters. The book found on a bus (i.e.. outside the conjugal frame) and read in a garage contains no language that is not already familiar from ordinary life, yet somehow this book serves to defamiliarise the language and to reveal a "hidden" content, one that is hidden in plain sight.
The unfamiliar world that the narrator is initiated into is one where the Earth has been infiltrated by aliens in human form, going about fairly ordinary human activities, These aliens differ from us in that they do not have a unified body organised hierarchically with the brain as hegemonic organ. Their organs can detach themselves and move independently, and their body may split in two (or perhaps even more) parts. He discovers that what some have considered to be the basis of modern day liberal ideology, the fixed unitary subject, is an imaginary construct, a fictional synthesis of a fragmentary body. That this discovery applies not just to the aliens of the book but to himself is signalled by the end of the book he seeks refuge from the horrible truth in a return to conjugal warmth, playing Monopoly with his wife and children in the kitchen. He tries to forget the truth glimpsed, declaring "I have no stomach for it", i.e., in effect he himself is one of the corporally fragmented aliens.
The story (text here, audio here) seems a little frivolous at first, but it is a good test case for the definition of science fiction as cognitive estrangement. Here the sense of wonder is induced in the hero as reader of what may well be an ordinary novel, but where he interprets literally certain habitually figurative expressions. Because the author is Philip K. Dick we are left with a certain doubt at the end: is the narrator just naive, perhaps even stupid, in taking words literally, at face value, or is he a step more "meta" than us, understanding what we have been trained to regard as second degree metaphorical discourse as in fact conveying literal truth?
I am reminded of Zizek's analysis of John Carpenter's film THEY LIVE. A homeless tramp discovers a pair of glasses that when donned reveals a world of alien invasion hidden beneath the superficial illusion of normality. Zizek claims that the normal perception is "ideology" and that the glasses serve to remove our ideological filters. The book found on a bus (i.e.. outside the conjugal frame) and read in a garage contains no language that is not already familiar from ordinary life, yet somehow this book serves to defamiliarise the language and to reveal a "hidden" content, one that is hidden in plain sight.
The unfamiliar world that the narrator is initiated into is one where the Earth has been infiltrated by aliens in human form, going about fairly ordinary human activities, These aliens differ from us in that they do not have a unified body organised hierarchically with the brain as hegemonic organ. Their organs can detach themselves and move independently, and their body may split in two (or perhaps even more) parts. He discovers that what some have considered to be the basis of modern day liberal ideology, the fixed unitary subject, is an imaginary construct, a fictional synthesis of a fragmentary body. That this discovery applies not just to the aliens of the book but to himself is signalled by the end of the book he seeks refuge from the horrible truth in a return to conjugal warmth, playing Monopoly with his wife and children in the kitchen. He tries to forget the truth glimpsed, declaring "I have no stomach for it", i.e., in effect he himself is one of the corporally fragmented aliens.
March 14, 2015
A short short story, by an author I have seen mentioned many times but have never read. I will reserve judgment on the author's work in general until I can read more of his work, and longer pieces. This one was cute: an example of what can go wrong in a reader's mind if he takes the words on the page too literally.
March 31, 2019
Aliens can pull off their body parts. Weird...
May 15, 2023
chuckleworthy satire of the unnecessarily in-depth analysis (aka BS) English teachers expect 🫡🤓
January 18, 2019
This short story is an extreme example of taking a book too seriously. A man grows paranoid as he takes the words he reads in an eerie novel literally, seeing visions of the horrific words he reads in his surroundings and driving him wild with frenzied visions of fright. A bit silly in some areas, but the cleverness of the idea is worth applauding.
January 5, 2017
This 1100-word report by Philip K. Dick about apparent aliens among us is as alarming now as when first published in 1953.
Online at
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
Online at
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
June 24, 2016
Not a book. A short story written by Dick. His twisted view and sense of foreboding is absolutely on point! Great story.
June 17, 2022
Paranoid weirdo misunderstands romance novel
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 12, 2017
Read as a part of Minority Report and Other Stories
This was clearly a tongue in cheek, very short story which takes us through a man's thoughts as he takes phrases he reads in a book, like "He gave her a hand" and "Her eyes followed him up the stairs", literally. So the man thinks there's an alien race on earth that can take off their body parts and organs which inevitably leads to a humorous freak-out.
This was clearly a tongue in cheek, very short story which takes us through a man's thoughts as he takes phrases he reads in a book, like "He gave her a hand" and "Her eyes followed him up the stairs", literally. So the man thinks there's an alien race on earth that can take off their body parts and organs which inevitably leads to a humorous freak-out.
November 27, 2020
Funny story. Funniest part being when the narrator calls his wife the ordinary run-of-the-mill person. I guess it was intended as the narrator was that sort of person who is the most ordinary kind of person that is prone to kindle conspiracy theories at every and anything possible. Good enough to story to read along with your tea.
January 16, 2019
Oh wow, I feel a mental break down coming.
May 8, 2020
A very short funny story about a man who believes he has uncovered an alien invasion.
June 26, 2020
Cool little short parody piece playing on the style of language common to average literature and even everyday, a take on perception and interpretation...
September 30, 2020
Sounds like Junie B Jones is related to him.
March 6, 2021
The shortest book I’ve read and it’s quite funny too. Loved the satire
Displaying 1 - 30 of 242 reviews