Heaven: A Novel

The narrator’s eyes play a significant symbolic role in Heaven. They represent his maturing perspective of the world and his identity, and they also serve as a reminder of his birth mother, who also had a lazy eye.

The narrator introduces his lazy eye in the first chapter of the novel, shortly before the novel presents the initial correspondence between him and Kojima. The narrator describes having to lean in closely to read Kojima’s letters because his lazy eye causes him to see half of the world as blurry. This gives him frequent headaches and interferes with his depth perception, making him prone to accidents. In this way, the narrator’s inability to see the world with perfect clarity represents the complications of his perspective of the world. He confronts the reality of being bullied at school but often wonders about what his bullies’ cruelty implies about the world. At the end of the novel, when he has his eyes treated through corrective surgery, he takes off his bandage and sees the world with perfect clarity for the very first time, weeping at his solitude in the beauty of the world. This corresponds with his