Barcoded
spoilers

After all the dismembered corpses, flowering brains, and horrific suicides that appear in MPD Psycho, I still find the barcoded eye to be one of the most disturbing images it presents. But why?

Firstly, because this is not death. This is the cause of death. Every one of these barcoded eyes seems to belong to a psychopathic killer. Were they put there at birth? Were these people created to be killers? It seems Zenitsu's Society is creating psychopaths, even making sure they finish what they start. Likely the Society is also behing the eyebank registry of each one of these killers.

The eye is a very powerful symbol for the average human. It represents sight, the sense we depend on most, but at the same time it's more than that. Often it is said that eyes are the window to the soul. They are one of the first things people will look at when they meet, and they can convey many emotions.

Barcodes, on the other hand, are cold, mechanized, anonymous. They're supposed to mark products, created goods which the parent wants to keep track of along the way. And this, I would guess, is the same thing to do with the barcodes on the eyes - keeping track in an anonymous way.

Seeing these two images together is jarring for even the most crime comic-hardened reader. It goes beyond the "ewww, gross" reflex into the truly bizarre. In a manga full of intense, disturbing images, the authors needed to find something to disturb readers on a different level than most of the visual imagery, and I believe they succeeded.