Would you agree that this story is a comment on ‘seeing’? Support your point with instances from the text.

The short story, “The Eyes Have It” narrated from a blind person’s perspective shomed the narrator’s deep desire for vision. The narrator hides his blindness to strangers by describing everything around him, using his mind’s eye. We saw this in the narrator’s conversation with the girl like-“Have you noticed ?” | ventured, “that the trees seem to be moving while we seem to be standing still.” He even complimented the girl saying, “You have an interesting face”, which apparently proved that he was not blind. Throughout the story, we saw the narrator’s desperation to perceive the girl through his eyes. The desperation was so much that after the girl left, he asked his second fellow traveller how had the girl worn her hair. With this, he used his earlier perception of the girl’s voice and the sound of the girl’s slippers to create her image in his mind’s eyes. We saw that the entire story revolves around the desire to see, the desire to defy blindness by using the mind’s eyes. Thus it can be said that the story is a comment on seeing.


With the help of this text, how does the author prove that the mind’s eye is more powerful than our natural eyes?


The short story ‘The Eyes Have It’, written by Ruskin Bond proves that the mind’s eye is more powerful than our ‘natural eyes the organs of sight. Even people with little or no eyesight at all can perceive the world with the mind’s eye. The author brings out the difference between mere ‘seeing’ and perception when he says that often people with good eyesight fail to see what is right in front of them whereas even minute details do not escape the sightless. It is the mind that rules the senses and when one of the sense organs is nonfunctional, the other sense organs become sharper. This enabled the narrator to give a true to life account of the beauty of Mussoorie hills in the month of October. The deftness of his mind’s eye helped the narrator to carry on the game of pretension. Also, the image of the girl visualised by the narrator will remain with him for a long time.