How can eyes hear tape recordings?

For the third time in this course we have encountered a novel that is a retelling of a character's life through his own eyes. In Q&A it was Ram having a conversation with a lawyer, in White Tiger it was Balram writing letters to the Premier of China, and in Animal's people it is Animal recording his memories on a tape recorder.
In Animal's people the audience is not a single person, like its two predecessors, it is to a collective audience that he calls "Eyes." I thought this was an interesting choice for the name of the audience since it is through the eyes that readers would encounter his story, but also because one of the main themes in the novel is the way people perceive Animal. Animal is disfigured and disabled because he is forced to walk on all four limbs and because of this he is considered more of an animal than a human, at least at the beginning of the novel.
As the novel continues, though, it is unclear if Animal thinks that people look at him like an animal or if he himself wants people to look at him that way in an effort to gain strength from the fact that he has come to identify himself as an animal. As the novel goes forward it is harder to associate Animal with an actual animal because he is self aware and has very human desires. He is vulgar and rude like a human and even pulls off scams like a human. It is taking this into account that I ask myself: Is Animal associating himself with an animal in efforts to take away the responsibility of his actions and therefore shift the Eyes from his internal motives to his superficial appearance? And in doing so does the message in this novel that having a disability makes people less than human in hopes to bring forth the humanist aspects of poverty in the process?