Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Blindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience
Biological Needs and Human Society
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
The narrator suggests that if the thieves’ accountant “c[a]me over to this side,” he might instead chronicle the inmates’ lack of food and resources, note that the thieves made the hospital’s sanitary situation even worse by blocking access a bathroom, and condemn them for hoarding and wasting food. The healthy have become sick, the flu has spread fast, and nobody has any medicine—including the two blind people with cancer. The narrator continues that the accountant would give up, realize that someone else has stolen his food, and go back to the thugs’ ward just so that he wouldn’t go hungry.
Just as the doctor’s wife felt a troubling sense of empathy for the thugs’ bodyguard at the end of the previous chapter, here the narrator points out how easy it would be for the roles to be switched and the novel’s various characters to be forced to defend principles opposite to the ones they actually hold. Moreover, the narrator’s commentary on the accountant is a way of pointing out how perspective often determines what appears good or evil and illustrating that morality ultimately proves irrelevant to human beings when survival is on the line.
Themes
In fact, every time that the food arrives, the internees angrily protest and consider a collective uprising, but they give up when they remember that the thieves have a gun. They eventually decide to send a larger group to retrieve the food, but the thieves chase this group away with a gunshot and cudgel blows, then deny the other ward food for three days and cut their rations by half afterward.
The internees’ resignation is similar to the hypothetical situation in which the accountant switches sides, because it shows that people can only make use of their moral and political imagination when their lives are not on the line—not only do basic physical needs come first, but when some people act selfishly and refuse to treat others as equal members of a community, collective decision-making becomes impossible. This leads to a sort of paradox: while people can best ensure everybody’s survival by forming a community, people avoid forming communities when their individual well-being is on the line. The only way to resolve this conflict is to create a sense of trust in the collective through social or moral conscience.
Themes
At this point, the thugs start demanding additional valuables from the rest of the internees, who start to complain that they have nothing left and turn on one another, inventing excuses for why they (but not others) deserve food. People find valuables hidden by their wardmates, but “to conceal their crime,” some pretend to be others when they hand them over. Luckily, the accountant does not check these new contributions against people’s original ones.
The hoodlums do not care that their demand is unreasonable because they refuse to listen to all dissent—if their demand is illogical, in other words, they will punish the other internees rather than recognizing their own error. This effectively breaks down everyone else’s morale: as the internees desperately adapt to these new and unreasonable conditions, they turn against one another. With trust and empathy thrown out the window, it’s even more difficult to form the kind of organized force that would be necessary to reclaim power and seize food from the thugs.
Themes
A week later, the thugs demand that the others send them women, and they threaten to withhold food when everyone refuses. In one of the wards, a messenger proposes that women volunteer, which leads to an outcry: the men try to convince the women to go, but the women ask whether the men would go if the thugs had asked for them. In the first ward on the right, the doctor’s wife agrees to go, but the first blind man protests vehemently that the blind man’s wife must not go. However, she volunteers anyway, infuriating him. She asks, “What are we to do?” Gazing at her scissors, the doctor’s wife is thinking either the same thing, and she’s also wondering what to do with the scissors.
The thugs’ new demand is a horrifying example of human evil, both because of the specific trauma inflicted through sexual violence against women and the dehumanization inherent to treating human beings like property in a transaction. The men’s easy agreement reflects that, perhaps because of the horrible conditions in the hospital, they have completely lost empathy and can no longer imagine the world from anybody else’s perspective—this is why the women turn the proposal back on the men, who are likely not used to being sexually objectified. Similarly, the first blind man’s insistence that his wife not go to the thugs seems less about his wife’s wellbeing than about protecting his own feelings and sense of ownership over his wife. This reflects the underlying disrespect in their relationship and suggests that the violent and transactional nature of the thugs’ demand might actually reflect a deeper pattern of oppressive relationships between men and women in the novel.
Themes
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The thugs decide to take women one ward at a time, which is more systematic and efficient for them. Meanwhile, the women start remembering their past sexual experiences so that they can use these memories of consensual sex as a kind of shield against the thugs’ violent assaults. The girl with the dark glasses refuses to go to the thugs, but she does have sex with the old man with the eyepatch for reasons that nobody quite understands.
Knowing that they will soon be raped, the women desperately try to ensure that the assaults will not dominate their associations of sex. This process also reminds them of how consensual, pleasurable sex is a part of the human experience that’s missing for those incarcerated in the hospital.
Themes
Another night, while the doctor’s wife watches, the doctor gets up and walks over to the girl with the glasses, then gets into her bed. The girl wakes up and then has sex with the doctor, who afterward wonders whether his wife might find out. When the doctor is about to return to his bed, his wife lightly touches him and tells him not to get up or try to explain himself. The girl with the glasses starts crying, but the doctor’s wife embraces her and tells her that this is not her fault, and that sometimes “words serve no purpose.” Then, the doctor’s wife reveals to the girl: “I can see.” The girl notes that she has suspected this from the beginning, and they whisper back and forth for some time, the doctor’s wife consoling the girl. Then, the doctor’s wife helps her husband back to their bed.
The doctor’s tryst with the girl with the glasses is impulsive and inexplicable, seemingly a product of the desperate circumstances. The doctor’s wife seems to understand this and, accordingly, she doesn’t treat it as a meaningful violation of their marriage. Her admission that “words serve no purpose” in this situation illustrates a broader principle about how trauma silences people in this book. The novel’s words strive to capture the full depth of the characters’ emotions, just as characters attempt to use words to change their circumstances—but both of these attempts inevitably fall short. Nevertheless, while language cannot change the circumstances that cause trauma, forming one’s own narrative is one of the few ways in which a person can move beyond trauma and preserve their sense of humanity and individuality.
Themes
At dinner the next day, the thugs arrive at the doctor’s wife’s ward and ask how many women they have. There are seven—“three men for each women,” the thugs note, laughing. The thugs declare that the women must visit them after they finish eating, and one of them warns that any women who are menstruating aren’t wanted. The thugs leave, and the women, who cannot bear to eat any more, form a line behind the doctor’s wife. They consider going outside and letting the soldiers shoot them, but instead they continue towards the thugs’ ward. On the way, the doctor’s wife sees the other wards’ women “curled up in their beds like animals,” traumatized to the point that they scream if anyone approaches them.
The thugs’ laughter suggests that they are an embodiment of willful evil: they get a sadistic, animalistic pleasure out of violence. This contrast with the women’s utter despair, as it shows that the thugs clearly neither want to understand nor are capable of understanding the actual consequences of their actions. As the women’s circumstances continue to worsen and they begin losing all hope, they seriously consider the possibility that death might be their best option.
Themes
The women enter the thugs’ ward, where the men surround them and their gun-toting leader starts to fondle them, one after another. He chooses to stay with the doctor’s wife and the girl with the dark glasses. The leader violently rapes the girl, who vomits as he finishes, and then he tells his cronies that she is theirs. They come and drag the girl away, and then the ringleader forces the doctor’s wife onto her knees and demands oral sex. At first, she refuses. The ringleader tells her he remembers her voice, and she replies that she remembers his face—he is confused but does not understand. She tries to reach for the man’s gun, but she cannot get to it, and she does what he has demanded.
This rape scene is intentionally graphic and difficult to read—with it, Saramago is challenging his readers to confront humanity’s boundless capacity for evil, which is deeper and more horrific than most people would like to acknowledge and tends to be most prominent in times of crisis. Looking the other way and failing to acknowledge this evil is, in a sense, failing to do justice to those who suffer it: for the reader, taking the women’s experiences seriously and empathizing with them requires digesting all the unsavory and horrific details. Accordingly, this passage requires readers to find a kind of emotional strength that most people do not use in their daily lives, and this is similar to the emotional strength that the novel’s protagonists must find to overcome their circumstances.
Themes
At dawn, the women return to their ward, having suffered “everything that can be done to a woman while still leaving her alive” throughout the night. As they pass the front door and see the soldiers preparing to give out the food boxes, one of the women collapses. In the ward, the doctor’s wife lays this woman on her bed and announces that “she’s dead.” The doctor asks “what happened,” but the women say nothing, as no words can explain their experience. The doctor’s wife tells the men to get the food, and the doctor and the old man with the eyepatch agree to go, while the first blind man refuses.
The women’s death punctuates trauma with tragedy. Since no words can fully capture the physical pain, sense of objectification and powerlessness, and loss of dignity and autonomy that the women have just suffered, putting any words to it would simply mean watering down their experiences for the men. Indeed, the emotional labor of putting their experience into words—which first requires fully acknowledging and making sense of it—is also an unrealistic feat for the traumatized women. The doctor’s wife makes it clear that the least the men can do is respect the women’s need for silence to recuperate—and to pick up some of the burden by retrieving the food. The first blind man’s refusal to help suggests not only that he is lazy and selfish, but also that he remains incapable of empathizing with the others or viewing himself as part of a collective.
Themes
The doctor’s wife looks for some way to wash the dead woman’s body, “to deliver her purified to the earth.” In the hospital’s dining hall, she layers the plastic bags from the food inside one another, and then she fills them with water and runs out before the confused blind internees all around her catch up. In the ward, the doctor’s wife washes the dead woman’s corpse, the rest of the women, and then herself.
The doctor’s wife’s quest to “purify” the dead woman represents her hope to regain some semblance of control, even if just symbolic and narrative, back from the thugs: she refuses to let them have the last word. In washing the rest of the group, she also takes on the role of protector and caretaker, which suggests that the severity of her trauma at the hands of the thugs may be driving her to finally start using whatever tools she can access to fight back.
Themes
