Among the most universal and powerful images in literature is the motif of the eye. Spanning from religious texts and mythology to Vonnegut and Hemingway, the eye fascinates writers because of its complexity and mystery. The eye has the powerfully unique ability to represent the bridge between mind and body. Indra Sinha makes use of this motif in his book Animal’s People in order to intensify the importance of personal perspective in understanding the world and to explain the relationship the mind has with our biological selves. Because Animal’s story comes to us through a tape recording, then through translated writing, and then in a published book, Sinha uses eyes and sight to demonstrate the impossibility of two minds sharing the same
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Unlike the classic all-seeing eye of traditional writing, the window into the soul, Sinha writes of an eye that is a purely biological structure, and is incapable of connecting the mind and the body, hard as it might try. The age-old question of mind and body is impossible to answer. Are we only biological structure, just grey matter that is connected to our sensing organs? Or is the mind a unique entity that has some extra-physical existence? For Sinha, our mind is not a physical entity, and the eye is the biological bridge between the physical world of suffering and the ethereal, conceptual world where the mind exists. Most notably, Sinha expresses this through the character of Ma Franci, who has lost much of her mental faculty but still survives biologically. He writes: “Ma’s eyes are open, but she’s fully asleep, how often have I heard her shriek in her bed, it’s of that night she dreams, lying on her mat, so many years has she lain there the soft earth is moulded to her shape, the bumps and hollows near the hearth, made by a bony old bint who sees in dreams the moon turning to blood, the world curling up like a leaf in the palm of her hand.” The image this quote creates is chilling, contrasting the painfully real floor where her old body lies with the strange world where her mind roams. The unsettling image of her open eyes signifies the disconnect
Unlike the classic all-seeing eye of traditional writing, the window into the soul, Sinha writes of an eye that is a purely biological structure, and is incapable of connecting the mind and the body, hard as it might try. The age-old question of mind and body is impossible to answer. Are we only biological structure, just grey matter that is connected to our sensing organs? Or is the mind a unique entity that has some extra-physical existence? For Sinha, our mind is not a physical entity, and the eye is the biological bridge between the physical world of suffering and the ethereal, conceptual world where the mind exists. Most notably, Sinha expresses this through the character of Ma Franci, who has lost much of her mental faculty but still survives biologically. He writes: “Ma’s eyes are open, but she’s fully asleep, how often have I heard her shriek in her bed, it’s of that night she dreams, lying on her mat, so many years has she lain there the soft earth is moulded to her shape, the bumps and hollows near the hearth, made by a bony old bint who sees in dreams the moon turning to blood, the world curling up like a leaf in the palm of her hand.” The image this quote creates is chilling, contrasting the painfully real floor where her old body lies with the strange world where her mind roams. The unsettling image of her open eyes signifies the disconnect