The Thread and the Eye of Life

Description

The reader of this story will find themselves confronted with a new artistic experience: bold, exciting, and strange. The reader may be surprised by what they read, and their surprise may even reach the point of reminiscence. But they will not stop reading until the last line. The author creates a strange world, the complex world of the human psyche, and draws us into it with supreme artistic skill. We have no choice but to delve into it until the end, regardless of our reactions to this strange world. The story begins with one of the characters the author creates, and this character, the doctor, serves as the narrator. The doctor or narrator quickly withdraws after giving us the purely scientific side of the patient’s condition presented in the story—the side that touches on the surface but does not delve into the interior, that diagnoses pain but does not reach the depths of the human psyche or the depths of the subconscious. In sharp contrast to this expression of outward appearance, the patient’s letter reveals the other side of the picture, the inner world. The hidden world, of which we may live and die in ignorance. With the conclusion of the patient’s letter, which encompasses the greater part of the story, the character’s world in the story is integrated into its two aspects: external and internal, conscious and unconscious. We, the readers, realize what the doctor and the patient do not: that the two are two sides of the same coin, and the doctor is the patient, and the patient is the doctor. The divide between them is the divide between the external world and the internal world, between the conscious world and the conscious world and the unconscious world. Each stands in contradiction to the other, protected by its own world from the other world, which complements its own.