Depending upon a stranger’s kindness to be able to go home in safety, we witness what appears to be the first sign of corruption and the first crack in society’s impending breakdown when the infamous volunteer steals the blind man’s car.

It all starts inexplicably when a man in his car suddenly starts seeing – or rather stops seeing anything but – a clear white brightness. In Blindness by Jose Saramago, authortells us the story of a mysterious mass plague of blindness that affects nearly everyone living in an unnamed place in a never specified time and the implications this epidemic has on people’s lives. “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.” When it’s every man by himself, when every man is free to do whatever he wants without the impending fear of recognition and judgement, we start to feel – I was going to say see – what the man’s true nature is and the crumbling down of a civilization diseased with selfishness, intolerance and ambition, to name just few symptoms. With gorgeous prose, this thought-provoking book shows us how our world, ever so concerned and consumed by appearances, would deal with the loss of our most relied upon sense: vision. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing.Īs Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that’s bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.īlindness is a great novel by Portuguese writer José Saramago that deals with human’s individual and collective reactions when in the face of adversarial forces. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women.

Theme: Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience Biological Needs and Human SocietyĪ city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one. Setting Place: An unnamed city, primarily in an abandoned mental hospital Major Characters: The doctor (Blindness), The doctor’s wife, The girl with the dark glasses, The first blind man, The first blind man’s wife, The boy with the squint, The old man with the black eye patch, The car thief First Publication: 1995 (English translation: 1997)

Jose saramago blindness book