Eye Spy Emotions

Throughout the novel, I think Flanagan has repeatedly come back to the idea that one can transcend or overcome physical and social barriers that hinder the formation of connections between people (or between people and other forms of life, namely fish). The mechanism or means by which this is achieved is through emotions. Although not everyone feels the same emotions, at the same time, in response to the same object or incidence, I think it can be said that there is some sort of universal truth in the emotions—we all have the ability understand different emotions and sympathize with the emotions of others. Perhaps Flanagan wants the reader to make these connections with the characters in the story as well.

One way in which Flanagan is able to argue these ideas is through his use of eyes as a motif. In this book, these organs hold a special significance, as Flanagan presents them as a means of revealing one’s emotions or discovering the emotion’s of others. There are countless times when the narrator chooses to describe the eyes of a fish or of another character in order to make a statement about the emotions felt by that fish, person, etc. and appeal to the reader’s pathos. For example…
• “I would only have two fish: each alone, fearful, united solely in the terror of death I see in their eyes” (63).
• (About the machine breaker) “…to see if he was yet dead, but always his eyes were clear, brighter than fire coals, & those eyes were always following us…” (82).
• (About the Surgeon) “I briefly smiled, but then I noticed he did not, that his dull eyes seemed to have become incandescent…” (129).
• (About the porcupine fish) “…but in the slightly fearful, slightly bellicose uplift of the eye’s large pupil I could feel the sudden excitement of being the angler…” (137).

Additionally, the Commandant attempts to isolate or hide himself behind a gold mask; the narrator, however, is still able to discern so much about what he is feeling and thinking, as his eyes are still exposed (174). There are even a few instances where Flanagan explicitly describes the eyes as portals to the depths of a one’s being and as a medium through which beings are connected. “I was falling, tumbling, passing through glass and through water into that seadragon’s eye while that seadragon was passing into me…” (38). “In the way the blue flame had leapt from the condemned man’s mouth at the fair into my mother, I wondered if all spirits seek another eye to enter at the dreadful moment…” (214).

The novel certainly lacks a cohesive chronological (or even simply logical) structure/plot and includes multiple contradictions, yet there are certain continuities (such as this motif) that are worth noting—as it may be through these subtleties that Flanagan relays the messages he wishes to convey to the reader and through them we may find some sort of truth.

Additional examples on pages: 31, 52, 85, 109 (description of the Surgeon’s eyes, connects the Surgeon to the porcupine fish), 118, 128, 161, 200