The Eyes Have It

Originally appearing in the magazine Science Fiction Stories in 1953, “The Eyes Have It” is an early story from Philip K. Dick, a prolific American science fiction writer who initially gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s before rising to national renown. Philosophical dilemmas, ontological perplexities, and the precarious relationship between humans and technology are just a few of the themes that characterize much of Dick’s work. His writing received several awards, including the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Castle (1963) and a Nebula Award for Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1975). A humorous take on the classic alien invasion trope, “The Eyes Have It” is the confession of a paranoid observer who is convinced he has found evidence of an extraterrestrial incursion in the paperback books he reads but is unable to do anything about it.

The version used for this study guide is available from Project Gutenberg, which reproduces the 1953 magazine version. Print versions are difficult to acquire, and the story has entered the public domain.

The story opens with an epigraph not written by Dick but inserted by the editors of Science Fiction Stories: “A little whimsy, now and then, makes for good balance. 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….”

The story takes place entirely in the home of the narrator, who “quite by accident […] discovered this incredible invasion of Earth by lifeforms from another planet” (Paragraph 1). Having written to the Government with his discovery, the narrator shrugs off “the whole thing [a]s known” and perhaps even “under control” (Paragraph 1). Indecisive, he confesses he hasn’t “done anything about it” (Paragraph 1) before relaying how his discovery came about.

Sitting in his “easy-chair” while “idly turning the pages of a paperbacked book someone had left on the bus” (Paragraph 2), the narrator is flummoxed by the references to an alien species in the book he reads. He focuses on numerous “reference[s] […] to a nonhuman species of incredible properties” (Paragraph 3). The narrator continues to relate his understanding of this alien species, gleaned through reading a single paperback novel.

With growing fear and revulsion, he discerns that these aliens have eyes that “come apart from the rest of [them] and [are] on their own” (Paragraph 5). He reaches this conclusion by misreading lines such as “…his eyes slowly roved about the room” (Paragraph 3) and “moved from person to person” (Paragraph 4). His failure to identify and understand figurative language changes his understanding of the novel and its characters, convincing him that what he is reading describes an invasive alien species. This belief is only deepened when he notices that “the characters in the book” do not react to the roaming eyes, “which suggested they belonged to the same species” (Paragraph 5).

The narrator’s attention immediately moves from observing the nonchalance of the characters to the disengaged attitude of the author of the left-behind paperback novel. This author “made absolutely no attempt to conceal this knowledge” of a “non-Terrestrial” species (Paragraph 6). When the narrator reads of a character, Julia, “blushing and knitting her brows angrily” (Paragraph 7), he feels some relief, assured that humans populate the story as well. When he gasps audibly, the narrator’s family, in front of whom he is reading, turns to him, and his wife asks, “What’s wrong?” (Paragraph 9). He lies to her, brushing his fear aside: “Knowledge like this was too much for the ordinary run-of-the-mill person” (Paragraph 10).

Moving from the interior of the home to the garage, the narrator continues to read. Focused on a passage in which Julia asks a man to remove his arm from her, the narrator believes he has discovered evidence of “a race of creatures capable of removing portions of their anatomy at will” (Paragraph 13). The narrator draws on his previous knowledge to determine that these aliens are “uni-cellular, some sort of primitive single-celled things” (Paragraph 13).

Within the narrator’s paperback novel, the characters—who are standing outside a theater—split into groups, with half going inside and half going elsewhere. The narrator, however, understands this as demonstrating “[b]inary fission, obviously. Splitting in half and forming two entities” (Paragraph 15).

The narrator’s assurance that Julia is, in fact, human is soon shattered when he reads that she “had given her heart to [a] young man” (Paragraph 18). Sickened by the grotesqueries of his reading, the narrator “rushe[s] from the garage and back inside the warm house, [where his] wife and children were playing Monopoly in the kitchen” (Paragraph 22). Joining them in their game, the narrator abandons his search and resigns himself to the eventuality of this alien invasion. Unable to do anything about creatures such as those the paperback book describes, the narrator confesses he “has no stomach” for resistance (Paragraph 24).