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Chapter 12
Themes
and Colors
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
There’s a big difference between “rational labyrinth” of the hospital and “the demented labyrinth of the city.” The blind huddle together outside the hospital, unsure of where to go and afraid to move, hoping that the soldiers will return to with food to give them. They speculate about whether there might be a cure. Some say that they will wait until dawn, when they feel the sun, and others fall asleep—some do not awaken. The doctor’s wife, wearing rags from the waist down and naked from the waist up, agrees that it is best to wait for morning. She starts planning a route to bring the blind from her ward to their homes. When the fire stops burning, the night grows cold—the blind sleep lightly, crowded together like a single, suffering entity.
The contrast between the hospital’s “rational labyrinth” and the city’s “demented” one is not only a commentary on their architecture: it also ironically points out how life was regimented and familiar to the patients in the hospital, but is now foreign and unknown in the city where they used to live. Their attachment to the familiar and fear of the unknown, a conventional human impulse now heightened by crisis, leads them to cling to the very hospital that has been a symbol of their oppression and powerlessness. Just as the narrator called them “madmen” but now calls the hospital a “rational” place, what used to look like evil oppression has started looking benevolent for the blind. This narrative trick demonstrates how easily opposites like good and evil, rational and irrational, and allies and enemies can flip when contexts change.
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It rains in the morning, which convinces some of the inmates that the soldiers will not bring their food. Led by the doctor’s wife, “the woman with eyes that can see,” some of the blind muster up their last strength and head for the city center. The doctor’s wife wants to leave the others somewhere so that she can search for food on her own. The streets and all the shops are empty, perhaps because it’s early or perhaps because it’s raining, so the doctor’s wife leads the group to a shop, where she notices people lying on the floor. One man walks up to the door, sticks his arm out and tells the others, “It’s raining.” He is blind—and so are all the rest.
The soldiers’ complete disappearance is a more compelling reason to think they will not bring food, but the internees seem to choose the rain because this provides a more soothing and comfortable narrative: the soldiers are still out there, thinking about the internees’ dietary needs—they are just unable to come today. Realizing that this is absurd, the doctor’s wife takes the leadership role she has already assigned herself. The city is an eerie shell of its former self, which suggests that the blindness epidemic has fundamentally transformed it: the blind can no longer hope to return to their previous lives. Rather, they must figure out how to fashion new ones entirely.
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The doctor’s wife introduces herself and explains her group’s predicament. But the man reveals that the entire country has gone blind and that anyone who can still see keeps it a secret. In order not to lose other people, everyone looks for food in groups and takes shelter wherever they can. The people who managed to lock themselves in food stores were lucky at first but soon became targets: the man even remembers hearing that one food store got burned down with its residents inside. When the rain stops, the man tells the other members of his group, who grab their bags and head outside in their heavy winter clothing. Gradually, such groups fill the street, relieving themselves and wandering around in search of food.
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The doctor’s wife leads her group into the empty store, which is full of electric appliances and contains nothing useful in terms of food or clothing. The group settles inside, and the doctor’s wife tells them to wait for her to return (hopefully with food and clothes) and not to leave under any circumstances. Uncertain how far she will have to go to find food, the doctor’s wife notes the address. All around, she sees people walking up and down the street clinging to walls, sniffing around in search of food. She goes directly into the food stores she can see, but they are completely ransacked and barren.
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The doctor’s wife scours the city until she finds a supermarket, which is just as empty as the rest of the food stores. Inside, groups of blind people are crawling around, looking for food. One man gets a piece of glass stuck in his knee and complains about the “pricking”—his companions laugh at the sexual double-entendre and a woman goodheartedly fishes it out. The doctor’s wife wonders about the group’s morals and, watching those around her fight for food, admits to herself, “Hell, I’ll never get out of here.” But then she realizes that there is probably a storeroom of extra product somewhere near the supermarket, so she begins searching around. At the end of a long hallway, she finds a door that leads to a basement staircase, and she smells food behind it.
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The doctor’s wife grabs plastic bags for the food and mentally plots out her return to the store where her husband and companions from the hospital are waiting. Then, she starts descending into the pitch-black basement and begins to panic: in the dark, she finally feels like she’s blind. Three flights down, she nearly faints out of terror and starts crawling around, looking for food. She finds various containers full of various kinds of food and starts filling the plastic bags. She knocks over a stack of matchboxes and, delighted, lights one. “Praised be light,” she thinks, filling her bags with a huge amount of goods. Lighting match after match to guide her way, she eats some packs of chorizo sausage and bread before climbing the stairs back to the supermarket.
The doctor’s wife debates whether to tell the other blind people in the supermarket about the food downstairs, but she decides against it and justifies this decision by telling herself that the blind would injure themselves on their way down the stairs. (An added bonus, of course, is that she can return for more food when she needs it.) She runs out through the supermarket, past the blind people who are starting to smell and shout about the sausage she has eaten. Out of fear, she starts sprinting, indiscriminately running into people and knocking them over in cruel manner. Outside, it is raining—the blind use buckets, bowls, and pans to collect water.
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The doctor’s wife trudges onward, noting the street signs as she passes, until “she realizes that she has lost her way.” She sits and weeps, and then a group of dogs approaches her, sniffing at the food. She embraces one of the dogs, which licks up her tears, and then looks up and sees “a great map before her.” Its destiny must have been to appear, the narrator says, and the doctor’s wife follows it back to the store a few blocks away.
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When the doctor’s wife arrives at the store, she announces that she has food. Her companions wake up from “dreaming they were stones” and “transform themselves into persons” as they dig into the food. While they eat, the doctor’s wife recounts her journey to find the food, although she does not tell them that she decided to leave the door to the storeroom closed. They even feed the “dog of tears,” who barks at the people who approach their door.
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After they finish eating, the doctor’s wife concludes that the group can’t know whether they’ll find their homes the way the left time. She wonders whether her own housekeys and scissors would now be melted into one because of the fire that burned down the hospital. Fortunately, the doctor has their keys; then the rest admit that, for various reasons, they do not have their own. Still, they plan to find their homes, starting with that of the girl with dark glasses, who lives closest. But first, they sleep.
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