Fish Eyes Symbol in The Eyes Are the Best Part: Meaning and Analysis

What the fish eye is literally and where it appears first {#what-the-fish-eye-is-literally-and-where-it-appears-first}

The fish eye is a small, gelatinous orb that recurs throughout the novel as both a food item and a charged visual motif. In the family's Korean home cooking, the eye of a whole fish is presented at the table as part of the fish's head, and the novel treats it as an object that demands a decision: eat it, refuse it, or watch someone else consume it. The narrator describes the texture in precise sensory terms—slippery, firm, fatty on the outside with a hard white sphere underneath—which makes the eye feel less like ordinary food and more like a strange organ carrying emotional weight.

The symbol first appears in Chapter 1, when the narrator's mother breaks down a whole fish at the dinner table and announces that the eyes are the best part. She asks which daughter wants the eye; both refuse, and she eats it herself, declaring it delicious. The mother then reveals that she disliked fish skin and eyes as a child because her poor parents forced her to eat them—an admission that frames the eye as a marker of class and generational hardship. The same scene contains the first mention of the father since he left two weeks earlier, which the mother cuts off abruptly. From its first appearance, the fish eye is tied to absence, poverty, and the difficulty of speaking about loss.

The eye as superstition and maternal ritual {#the-eye-as-superstition-and-maternal-ritual}

In Chapter 2, the mother's relationship to fish eyes shifts from inherited habit to desperate superstition. After the father's departure, she cooks a feast with his favorite short ribs and a whole fried fish, setting an extra place at the table. When a neighbor's keys at the door raise false hope, she collapses, then asks her daughters if she is unlucky. She explains that fish eyes bring good luck and that eating one might bring their father back. She rips an eye from the fish and eats it despite her daughters' horrified protests, then offers the second eye, which they refuse. The mother's laughter—first harsh, then sincere—shows the eye as a fragile ritual of control in a situation where she has none.

The narrator's first consumption {#the-narrators-first-consumption}

In Chapter 6, the narrator decides to eat a fish eye deliberately, to cheer up her mother after a difficult day. The chapter follows a phone call from the father that leaves the mother visibly deflated. The narrator volunteers to try the eye, gags on it, but forces herself to swallow. Her mother responds with delight, declaring that this means Ji-won has matured and is all grown up. The scene links the eye to filial duty and to a performance of adulthood—the narrator is eighteen, already an adult by most measures, but the ritual grants her a symbolic maturity her age cannot. The mother then eats the second eye herself, and the narrator notes that all thoughts of the father are gone for the night. The eye here functions as a temporary anesthetic: a way to redirect grief into a shared, almost celebratory act.

Escalation: from fish to human eyes {#escalation-from-fish-to-human-eyes}

The symbol's meaning darkens as the narrator's compulsion grows. In Chapter 13, a nightmare literalizes the transition: the narrator finds herself trapped in a room whose walls are covered in eyes—glassy fish eyes, rabbit eyes, deer eyes—and eats them to escape. The dream ends with a human eye, blue and beautiful, on a plate; she eats it and wakes with her hands covered in blood. The dream maps the narrator's unconscious movement from fish eyes to human eyes, and from appetite to violence.

Chapter 21 shows the compulsion entering her waking life. During a philosophy final, she develops a stress migraine and envisions one of George's blue eyes. She leaves the exam, searches online for images of blue eyes and for information about eyeball anatomy, and becomes fixated on a student whose irises match the exact shade of the morning glories her father loved. The connection between George's eyes, her father's favorite flowers, and her academic collapse suggests that the eye has become a repository for multiple losses: the father's abandonment, George's presence in her home, and the pressure of supporting her family.

The escalation reaches its violent peak in Chapter 37, when the narrator finds a dead man behind the bushes near her car. She recognizes him as the man she gave coins to earlier that day. Lifting his eyelid, she sees his blue eyes and falls back in shock. She recalls her grandmother's funeral, when her mother pushed her toward the casket to say goodbye—a memory that links death, maternal pressure, and the gaze. Then, flooded with memories of George and his blue eyes, she takes a knife and cuts into the man's eyelid. The eyeball resists removal, so she digs it out with her nails until the optic nerve snaps. She shoves it into her pocket and flees.

In Chapter 38, she washes the eye at a gas station bathroom, studies her reflection, and eats it. The text notes that it is rich and meaty, unlike fish eyes—a direct comparison that marks the final transformation of the symbol. The fish eye, once a cultural inheritance and a superstition, has become a human eye consumed in an act of violence. She vomits pink-tinged foam and flushes it away, but the act itself has already changed her.

George and the reversal {#george-and-the-reversal}

The symbol also operates through George, the man who enters the family's life after the father's departure. In Chapter 22, at a feast celebrating the end of the narrator's first quarter, George mocks Ji-hyun and mentions that Chinese people eat fish eyes for good luck. He eats a fish eye and pulls it out of his mouth, offering it to the narrator—a gesture that is both crude and possessive. Ji-hyun pushes his hand away. The scene positions George as someone who treats the family's cultural rituals as entertainment, and who uses the fish eye as a provocation.

In Chapter 49, the reversal is complete. George stays over before a major presentation, and the mother prepares a fried mackerel with its eyes removed. George eats most of the food and crunches the fish eyes. By this point, the narrator has already consumed a human eye; the fish eye, which once carried the weight of superstition and maternal love, has become ordinary, even trivial. George's casual crunching of the fish eyes contrasts sharply with the narrator's escalating fixation, and the scene underscores how far she has moved beyond the family's rituals.

Character and theme connections {#character-and-theme-connections}

The fish eye connects most directly to the narrator, Ji-won, whose relationship to the symbol moves from refusal to reluctant consumption to violent obsession. For Umma, the eye is a superstition and a coping mechanism—a way to feel control after her husband's abandonment. For Ji-hyun, the eye is repulsive; she recoils from it repeatedly, and her refusal marks her as the family member who will not participate in the ritual. For George, the eye is a joke and a provocation, a way to assert dominance over the family's customs.

Thematically, the fish eye ties into consumption as a coping mechanism for inherited trauma: the narrator literally consumes the object of her fixation, just as her mother consumes fish eyes to manage grief. It also connects to the politics of looking and the reversal of the gaze—the narrator's obsession with eyes is an obsession with seeing and being seen, and her violent removal of the dead man's eye is a grotesque act of taking control over what she sees. The symbol also touches on domestic ritual as a site of control and resistance: the dinner table is where the eye appears, and the narrator's consumption of it is both an act of filial duty and, later, an act of defiance.

Study questions {#study-questions}

1. How does the meaning of the fish eye change from Chapter 1 to Chapter 38?

In Chapter 1, the fish eye is a cultural inheritance: the mother presents it as the best part of the fish, and her childhood memory of being forced to eat it links it to poverty and generational hardship. By Chapter 38, the narrator has consumed a human eye, and the text explicitly compares it to fish eyes—rich and meaty, unlike fish eyes—marking the symbol's transformation from a superstition to an act of violence. The fish eye begins as a shared family ritual and ends as a point of departure for the narrator's individual, and murderous, compulsion.

2. What role does the mother's superstition play in the narrator's development?

The mother's belief that fish eyes bring good luck—and her desperate consumption of one in Chapter 2 in hopes of bringing the father back—introduces the narrator to the idea that eating eyes can influence fate. The narrator's first deliberate consumption in Chapter 6 is framed as an act of filial duty, performed to cheer up her mother. But the same logic—that consuming an eye can change circumstances—underlies her later fixation on George's eyes and her eventual consumption of the dead man's eye. The mother's superstition provides the template for the narrator's compulsion.

3. How does George's relationship to fish eyes differ from the narrator's?

George treats fish eyes as a joke and a provocation. In Chapter 22, he eats one and offers it to the narrator, mocking the family's customs. In Chapter 49, he crunches fish eyes casually, without any of the weight the narrator attaches to them. For George, the eye is entertainment; for the narrator, it is an object of escalating obsession. The contrast highlights how the narrator has internalized and transformed the family's ritual into something George cannot understand.

4. What does the narrator's nightmare in Chapter 13 reveal about her state of mind?

The nightmare shows the narrator trapped in a room whose walls are covered in eyes—fish eyes, rabbit eyes, deer eyes—and eating them to escape. The dream ends with a human blue eye on a plate, which she eats with pleasure. The nightmare reveals that the narrator's compulsion has already moved from fish to human eyes at an unconscious level, and that she associates eating eyes with escape from confinement. The dream also connects the eyes to childhood memories—the dead rabbit, the deer her father hit—suggesting that the symbol is rooted in early experiences of death and loss.