The Eyes Have It

by Randall Garrett

"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."

Nobody blends satire and science fiction like renowned luminary of the genre Philip K. Dick. This short but utterly memorable tale tells the story of a man who is utterly convinced that the world is being overrun by aliens. Is he correct, or wildly off-base? Read The Eyes Have It to find out.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago and lived most of his life in California. In 1952 he began writing professionally, and during his lifetime he published 44 novels and roughly 121 short-stories. 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'. Of course, he also authored Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (1968), source material for the classic film 'Blade Runner' (1982). Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Humor, Classics, Audiobook, Ebooks

46 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1953

About the author

Randall Garrett's full name was Gordon Randall Phillip David Garrett. For more information about him see https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?239

He was married to Vicki Ann Heydron

His pseudonyms include: Gordon Randall Garrett, Gordon Aghill, Grandal Barretton, Alexander Blade, Ralph Burke, Gordon Garrett, David Gordon, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgenson, Darrel T. Langart, Blake MacKenzie, Jonathan Blake MacKenzie, Seaton Mckettrig, Clyde (T.) Mitchell, Mark Phillips (with Laurence Janifer), Robert Randall, Leonard G. Spencer, S.M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A super short story — the Project Gutenberg license at the end is far longer than the story itself — about a man who takes his fictional reads a little too literally. Are lifeforms from another planet secretly invading Earth or is there a much simpler explanation at hand?

And, eh, it's fun. There's not a whole lot to it and I'm skeptical that a man old enough to have a wife and children has never read a novel before (because, other than very recently acquired mental illness, that is the only way that any of this makes sense), but I suspect that I'm just taking this story a little more seriously than was intended by the author … much like this unnamed narrator did with his found-on-the-bus book, ha.

3.25 stars, rounded down.

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[La Coccinelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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.

[Katrina McCollough · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inside of Philip K Dick's brain is an amazing place.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taking English phrases literally can lead to craziness.

[Tristram Shandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[muthuvel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geeky Paranoid Protagonist playing literally with the workings of English words. Quite funny and enjoyable wearing his shoes.

[Shauny Free Palestine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice wordplay

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange little short story in which a man reads about an alien invasion in a book.

[Ariya · Rating 5 out of 5]

It takes me quite a while to figure out what's going on and when I get his trick my mind goes like, "AWWWWWWWW!"

[Cristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short story that takes everyday words and turns them into a paranoid sci-fi scenario. Clever, absurd and fun.
(You can find it on Project Gutenberg)

[Akshay · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick

"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."

Summary:
The Eyes Have It stands as one of Philip K. Dick's most economical demonstrations of his signature technique: ordinary consciousness colliding with surreal epistemological crisis. At approximately 1,100 words, it achieves what many science fiction authors require 300 pages to accomplish—the complete defamiliarization of language itself, forcing readers to confront the slippery boundary between paranoia and prophetic insight. The story functions simultaneously as linguistic joke, paranoia narrative, philosophical meditation on fragmentation, and critique of ideology.

The Architecture of Misreading:
The narrative mechanism is deceptively simple: an unnamed narrator discovers an abandoned novel on a bus and begins reading. Innocent sentences—"his eyes slowly roved about the room," "her eyes move from person to person," "he gave her a hand"—trigger epistemological alarm. The narrator, taking these idiomatic expressions literally rather than figuratively, constructs an elaborate theory of alien invasion. The invading aliens possess a radical physiological difference from humanity: their bodies lack unified coherence. Instead, organs detach and operate independently.

The genius of Dick's construction lies in its graduated escalation. Early in the story, only eyes disturb the narrator—their movement through air rather than across surfaces, their ability to "fasten" on individuals. But as he continues reading, he accumulates evidence: arms that are "given," brains that can be "lost," hearts that can be "taken." A nightmare vision emerges of fragmented creatures assembled from human body parts, operating in concert yet fundamentally disconnected.

What makes this approach brilliant is that the reader understands the narrator's error before the narrator does. We recognize the figurative language simultaneously with recognizing that he does not. This creates what literary theorist Terence Blake identifies as cognitive estrangement—the defining mechanism of science fiction itself. The "sense of wonder" is induced not through discovering impossible technology but through watching the narrator discover that ordinary language contains encoded strangeness.

Spoiler Discussion: The Ambiguity at the Heart
Dick deliberately refuses to resolve a crucial ambiguity: Is the narrator simply naive, or is he perceiving a hidden truth?

The story's brilliance emerges from maintaining this indeterminacy. When the narrator writes to the government seeking confirmation, they respond with a pamphlet titled "On the Repair and Maintenance of Frame Houses." The literalist reader might interpret this as dismissal—the government's way of suggesting he focus on ordinary domestic concerns. But the metaphorical reader recognizes the loaded language: they are telling him to remain within his "frame"—to maintain the frame of ordinary perception.

This echoes philosopher Slavoj Žižek's analysis of John Carpenter's film They Live, wherein homeless protagonist receives sunglasses that reveal an alien invasion hidden beneath the surface of normality. The glasses remove ideological filters. In Dick's story, the book found outside the conjugal frame (abandoned on a bus, read in a garage) similarly functions to defamiliarize ordinary perception. The narrative asks: What if the conspiracy the narrator detects is real? What if modern alienation truly is an invasion of the unified subject?

The Deep Structure: Fragmentation and Modernity
While the surface reading generates humor and the middle reading generates unease, Dick's story contains a third interpretive layer that rewards serious engagement. The aliens described are not extraterrestrial visitors at all—they are us, or more precisely, what we have become in consumer capitalism.

The narrator's accumulation of body parts creates a typology of modern fragmentation:

Parents reduced to their child-rearing function (bodies standardized by parenting literature)
Factory workers reduced to hands (assembly-line workers)
Bureaucrats reduced to calculating minds (bookkeepers as calculators)
Salespeople reduced to smile/charm (the performative face)
Listeners reduced to ears (emotional labor as auditory reception)
Consumers reduced to digestive systems (stomachs and intestines pumping goods through)

One sharp reader identifies the existential horror at the story's core: "When have we last felt whole about a thing?" Dick's 1953 story anticipates by decades the contemporary critique of subject fragmentation under late capitalism. The narrator glimpses something true—that modern life does indeed operate by decomposing the unified subject into functional roles—but the truth is too terrible to bear.

His refuge, therefore, is not ignorance but escape into ideology. He joins his family for Monopoly, playing "with frantic fervor," explicitly stating: "I have absolutely no stomach for it"—a final pun, since he has acknowledged that his own "stomach" (appetite for consumption) is precisely what fragments him. The game of Monopoly itself becomes symbolically resonant: a game about accumulation and competitive fragmentation, masquerading as family harmony.

The Linguistic Turn: Why Language Matters
What distinguishes The Eyes Have It from mere wordplay is that Dick uses linguistic misreading to defamiliarize language itself. The narrator doesn't stumble over complex metaphors or poetic innovations—he encounters dead metaphors, the idioms we use without thinking. This is significant. A living metaphor announces itself as figurative. A dead metaphor has calcified into literal meaning, hiding its figurative origin beneath conventional usage.

By making the narrator literalize these dead metaphors, Dick forces us to recognize them as metaphors again. We suddenly see that "eyes moving" is not a literal description but an imaginative encoding of attention. We recognize that "giving a hand" preserves an ancient metaphor of assistance-as-physical-gift. The ordinary language we navigate unconsciously suddenly reveals its constructed, metaphorical nature.

This connects to broader philosophical debates about language and reality. If our language is fundamentally metaphorical, if our "ordinary" perception is mediated through dead metaphors whose origins we've forgotten, then what counts as literal truth? The narrator's "paranoia" becomes a hyperattentive reading practice—perhaps naive, perhaps prophetic, but undoubtedly a way of seeing language differently.

Genre Innovation and Science Fiction
Published in 1953, The Eyes Have It appears early in Dick's career (he began writing professionally in 1952) yet demonstrates full command of what would become his signature technique. The story is fundamentally a science fiction story about reading. The alien invasion exists nowhere but in the narrator's encounter with text. The defamiliarization of English idioms constitutes the entire speculative premise.

This represents innovation within the SF tradition. Rather than positing technological wonders or alternate worlds, Dick asks: What if language itself could become strange? What if ordinary communication contained encoded alienness? This approach predates postmodern metafictional experiments and anticipates contemporary theory of language and ideology.

The story also demonstrates Dick's enduring interest in the relationship between perception and reality. Unlike authors who employ unreliable narrators for purely narrative effect, Dick uses the narrator's misreading to raise genuine epistemological questions. Can we trust perception? Does our language deceive us or reveal truth? What is the difference between paranoia and insight? These questions will preoccupy Dick throughout his career—in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and A Scanner Darkly.

The Diminishing Form: Brevity as Aesthetic Choice
The story's extreme brevity is not a limitation but a structural asset. One reviewer notes that the Project Gutenberg license appended to the text is longer than the story itself—a detail Dick might have found amusing given his preoccupations with the arbitrary boundaries between texts and paratexts.

The form mirrors the content. Just as the narrator's paranoia escalates rapidly from idle reading to governmental correspondence, the story compresses maximum thematic density into minimal space. The reader experiences the same cognitive whiplash as the narrator—a moment of innocent reading exploding into epistemic crisis. A longer narrative would dilute this effect. The story's power derives from its refusal to elaborate, explain, or resolve.

Critical Reception and Interpretive Layers
Goodreads reviewers demonstrate the story's capacity to accommodate multiple readings simultaneously. Some approach it as pure satire—a tongue-in-cheek joke about the dangers of reading fiction too literally. One reader characterizes it as "chuckleworthy satire of the unnecessarily in-depth analysis (aka BS) English teachers expect." This reading is legitimate and fun.

Other readers discover philosophical depth. Bill Kerwin writes: "At first this seems nothing more than an amusing story, little 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." This reader has moved beyond surface humor toward recognition of the story's genuine unsettling quality.

Still others connect the story to broader critiques of language and ideology, recognizing Žižekian resonances (glasses that reveal hidden truth, ideological filters, frame of perception) without requiring explicit theoretical apparatus.

The story's success lies in its tolerance for all these readings. It functions adequately as joke. It works more richly as paranoia narrative. It achieves greatest depth as philosophical meditation on fragmentation and language. Dick refuses to privilege one reading, instead constructing the text so that each reading reinforces the others.

What the Story Reveals About Dick
Despite its brevity, The Eyes Have It crystallizes Dick's characteristic concerns:

Paranoia as epistemological method—The narrator's "madness" is a form of hypervigilant reading that detects patterns others miss
Ordinary people in surreal circumstances—Not a visionary or expert, just an unnamed reader encountering strangeness on a bus
The instability of perception—What seems paranoid may be prophetic; what seems normal may be ideological
Language as site of contestation—Meaning is not transparent but constructed, coded, metaphorical
The comfort of ideology—The narrator's flight into Monopoly and normalcy is both understandable and tragic; easier to accept fragmentation than acknowledge it

These preoccupations will expand across Dick's career but achieve compact perfection here.

Minor Criticism: Plausibility of the Premise
One reader raises a legitimate objection: the narrative requires accepting that an adult man with a wife and children has never read a novel before. This stretches credibility even in speculative fiction. Dick addresses this implicitly through the finding of the book "by accident" on a bus—suggesting the narrator's reading history is genuinely anomalous rather than narratively negligent. But accepting the premise demands accepting an unusual biographical coincidence.

This is a minor quibble. The story works despite requiring this one implausible condition. And arguably, the condition is narratively necessary—only someone genuinely naive about literary convention could misread so completely.

The Enduring Relevance
Published 1953, the story remains urgent. In contemporary reading culture—where algorithmic feeds defamiliarize language through repetition, where idiom accelerates beyond tracking, where irony and sincerity become indistinguishable—Dick's meditation on the instability of language feels prophetic rather than quaint. We live in an era of competing interpretive frames, where "normal perception" is ideologically contested, where paranoia about surveillance and algorithmic manipulation mingles with legitimate security concerns. The narrator's inability to determine whether he perceives truth or madness has become everyone's epistemological condition.

Final Assessment:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (5/5) — A Perfect Short Story

The Eyes Have It achieves complete integration of form, content, and meaning. It functions as humor, paranoia narrative, philosophical meditation, and linguistic experiment simultaneously. The brevity is not limitation but perfection—achieving maximum thematic density without waste. For readers interested in linguistics, philosophy, science fiction, or simply literature that rewards close attention, this story repays engagement vastly beyond its length. It demonstrates why Philip K. Dick, despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, is recognized as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. The story asks genuine questions about perception, language, and reality without pretending answers exist. It unsettles while amusing, provokes while entertaining. It remains, nearly 75 years after publication, a flawless artifact of imaginative thinking.

Recommended For:

Readers interested in linguistic philosophy and the nature of metaphor
Those seeking science fiction that operates through intellectual estrangement rather than technological speculation
Anyone curious about Philip K. Dick's development as a writer
Literature students studying paranoia, unreliable narration, and cognitive estrangement
Readers who appreciate formally perfect short stories regardless of genre

Not Recommended For:

Readers seeking plot-driven narrative or character development
Those uncomfortable with ambiguous endings and unresolved epistemological questions
Readers looking for traditional alien invasion SF (though the story plays with these expectations)

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Metonymy at the outer limits. Also, the amorphous structure and expectations of some science fiction.

[Isca Silurum · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Terence Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Michael Sorbello · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

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...

[TraceyL · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aliens can pull off their body parts. Weird...

[tarbg · Rating 5 out of 5]

chuckleworthy satire of the unnecessarily in-depth analysis (aka BS) English teachers expect 🫡🤓

[Joseph Inzirillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book. A short story written by Dick. His twisted view and sense of foreboding is absolutely on point! Great story.

[Akrabar · Rating 5 out of 5]

audiobook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KXsc...

[Archana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The shortest book I’ve read and it’s quite funny too. Loved the satire

[Keith Bruton · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.6

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paranoid weirdo misunderstands romance novel

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Ravi Teja · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://americanliterature.com/author...

[Kay ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh wow, I feel a mental break down coming.

[Tasula · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very short funny story about a man who believes he has uncovered an alien invasion.