Eyes rolling up

Eyes rolling up are the body's involuntary tell where pleasure and pain meet — an image that recurs all the way to the Entertainment's viewers. It begins in Peter Beak's dream, "eyes roll up" (p. 111), and then recurs across bodies undergoing very different intensities: Pemulis's eyes "roll way up" at a lift, Schacht's at an injection, Burt F. Smith's rolling "with pleasure," Lyle levitating with "eyes rolled up white," soundless. By the visitor parade and the punt-memory the gesture has become a shared physiology linking the ecstatic, the drugged, and the mystically absorbed, so that when Hal's eyes roll up "(like Gately's and Lyle's)" the motif quietly places him in that company. The rolled-up eye is the novel's shorthand for a consciousness overwhelmed — pushed past the point where it can keep watching.