The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick, 1953
The magic trick:
Pulling narrative tension from a faulty shift in judgement from our protagonist
It’s all a big joke, of course, and, frankly, not really a very good joke. It’s a wordplay joke extended over several pages. A long-play pun.
But that’s not the weird part. What makes the story weird is that even as you recognize the joke, you still find yourself falling under the story’s haunting spell.
It’s a corny joke that finds horror in the punchline.
And that’s quite a trick on Dick’s part.
The selection:
There it was in a nutshell. The eyes had clearly come apart from the rest of him and were on their own. My heart pounded and my breath choked in my windpipe. I had stumbled on an accidental mention of a totally unfamiliar race. Obviously non-Terrestrial. Yet, to the characters in the book, it was perfectly natural — which suggested they belonged to the same species.
And the author? A slow suspicion burned in my mind. The author was taking it rather too easily in his stride. Evidently, he felt this was quite a usual thing. He made absolutely no attempt to conceal this knowledge.
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