I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg

“I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg” is an expression that turns an ordinary scene into an impossible one: the seated man appears passive, while the chair becomes an attacker. The book first presents the phrase as a standalone heading, then returns to it in Joe Pareti’s account of looking through mirrors, where the image becomes part of a changed way of seeing.

Appearance and Recurrence

The phrase appears as a heading after Mortonson’s account of an extraordinary experience that does not meet his spiritual expectations. The placement establishes the expression as a distinct textual image, but the heading does not establish that Mortonson himself says it. Its later appearance in Pareti’s story gives the phrase a specific speaker and situation: Pareti looks out through mirrors and says to himself, “I see a man sitting on a chair, and the chair is biting his leg.” The recurrence links the standalone image to an episode in which familiar surroundings take on unfamiliar meanings.

Pareti’s Mirrored Vision

Pareti’s statement follows a sequence in which his relation to mirrors changes. He asks himself what a mirror is and answers that it is “an eye waiting to be looked through.” Looking into one, he finds himself looking out from it. He then has five new eyes in his home: two on the bedroom walls, one on the bedroom ceiling, one in the bathroom, and one in the hall. Through these new viewpoints, he sees the couch as lovelorn, the standing lamp as furious, and the closet door as stiff-backed and mute with rage. The chair’s apparent bite belongs to this same inversion: furniture is no longer merely the background to human action but seems capable of acting upon a person.

Meaning and Limits

The sentence compresses Pareti’s altered perception into one compact, unsettling scene. Its grammar initially offers a recognizable arrangement—a man seated on a chair—then reverses the expected relation between object and body by making the chair the biter. The image therefore makes the act of seeing, rather than any explanation of the scene, the source of its disturbance. Pareti’s follow-up question, “IS THAT WHAT PEOPLE DO?”, leaves the perception unresolved: the phrase presents what he sees, while the question opens uncertainty about what such seeing means.