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 doctor and his wife’s house is orderly, as they left it when they went to the hospital, but covered with a layer of dust. For “the seven pilgrims,” it is like “paradise.” They love its musty smell and refuse to open the windows up to “the putrefaction outside.” The doctor’s wife collects everyone’s shoes in a bag, and then everybody struggles to get out of their clothes. She takes everything to the balcony, then “lights an oil lamp inside and amasses enough clean clothing for everyone. Still filthy, everyone at least has clean clothes, and they each find a space in the sitting room.
Like the girl with the glasses’ apartment, the doctor and his wife’s is orderly and untouched, in stark contrast to the chaotic outside world. Indeed, the protagonists are drawn to the smell of dust not only because it gives them a break from “the putrefaction outside,” but also—more importantly—because it represents the preservation of the past, the kind of life they used to live before and now hope to cultivate. By calling the protagonists “pilgrims,” the narrator introduces a religious dimension to their quest for comfort, identity, and connection: this is also a quest for salvation from their affliction and from the corrupt society that surrounds them.
Themes
Before dinner, the doctor’s wife explains that there is room for everyone in the apartment and asks someone to come with her to the supermarket tomorrow, both to help her carry the food and so that they can start to familiarize themselves with their surroundings in case she goes blind too. They’ll use a bucket out on the balcony as their bathroom, which is unpleasant but not nearly as bad as the degradation of internment. Now, all seven of them “are equal regarding good and evil,” and good and evil are based on people’s “relationships with others.” The doctor’s wife sets the table and they eat.
Recognizing that her group has finally reached its destination but continues to live with profound uncertainty about the nature of their blindness, the doctor’s wife starts making provisions for someone to replace her, so that the community she has established can continue to function in her absence. Although only in passing, here the narrator makes the book’s fundamental argument about morality and society explicit: all people are both good and evil, and their social organization and “relationships with others” are what bring out one side or another. These “relationships” are tied to people’s individual moral conscience, which is a function of their ability to imagine other people’s experiences and perspectives on events.
Themes
After dinner, the doctor’s wife helps the boy feel the oil lamp, which “one day [he] will see.” The boy asks for water, which the doctor’s wife fetches from the back part of the toilet. Then, the doctor reminds his wife that they have some water in the refrigerator, so she retrieves it and pours it for everyone in fancy glasses. Drinking this water brings some of them to tears.
The doctor’s wife next starts reestablishing the hope that her group has lost: by promising the boy that he will “one day” see the lamp, she insists that he has a future to look forward to. The provision of water, which is as basic an element of human life as light, shows that the protagonists are regaining the humanity that they have been denied throughout the novel. Indeed, the fact that they can lose access to something so fundamental as a glass of water serves to remind readers of the complex, interconnected, and interdependent nature of their lives.
Themes
That night, the seven pilgrims share “vague […] and imprecise” dreams about one another. In the morning, rain awakens the doctor’s wife, who sets out bowls, pots, and pans on the balcony to catch the rainwater and looks for soap and brushes to clean her companions’ filthy clothing. The other two women—the girl with dark glasses and the first blind man’s wife—join her on the balcony, where they undress and help her wash the clothing. The rain washes them, too, and the doctor’s wife tells them that they look beautiful. The girl with the glasses says that, in her dream, she saw the doctor’s wife as beautiful, too. The three women weep and embrace in the rain, then help wash one another and go inside, where they dry off with clean towels.
Although “vague […] and imprecise,” the protagonists’ dreams show that, even unconsciously, they are beginning to see themselves as a collective. The protagonists washing off the accumulated filth of the past also represents their washing off the pain, sin, and despair of their recent past. It also recalls the doctor’s wife washing the dead woman’s body after being raped by the thugs, and its clear connotations of religious purification shows how the protagonists are beginning to find their salvation through themselves and their newfound family relationships. If their blindness signifies a kind of spiritual disorientation, their washing and purification represents them gradually discovering a new moral orientation through the collective that they have formed.
Themes
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The old man with the eyepatch is sitting up: he has heard and smelled the women on the balcony, which showed him “that there [is] still life in this world.” The doctor’s wife says that the men can wash now, and the old man asks if he can use the bathtub. The doctor’s wife agrees and helps him carry in a basin of water to fill the bathtub, and then she hands him her last fresh bar of soap. The doctor’s wife leaves the old man alone to bathe, and he lathers up his whole body so intensely that he ends up covered in a cloud of foam. A pair of hands he cannot identify helps him wash his back, and he speculates about whose they might be while he finishes cleaning and shaving himself. When he is done, he goes outside to meet the others in the sitting-room.
The old man with the eyepatch finds pleasure and hope through the senses that he still retains: his newfound belief “that there [is] still life in this world” offers a hopeful counterpoint to the girl with the glasses’s repeated declarations that all of them are dead because they are blind. His playful cloud of foam in the bath suggests a return to childhood and underlines the way the protagonists’ new family allows them to reclaim a sense of innocence, vulnerability, and hope that they had to completely abandon in the hospital. Finally, the mysterious pair of hands, which could be anyone’s, represents the love the old man has found through his new, adopted family. This moment of connection is at once intimate and anonymous, a profound personal love based in the abstract sense of absolute equality and moral responsibility that the protagonists accept for one another.
Themes
The boy eats the remaining food, then the doctor’s wife leads the first blind man and his wife out to search for more. They pass piles of trash, horrible smells, masses of blind people, and stray dogs. But the first blind man and his wife get used to the feeling of their street corner, and the dog of tears sniffs the wind as though to remember the spot’s special scent. The group collects beans and peas from various food stores, and then they head for the first blind man and his wife’s house. They pass the street corner where the first blind man went blind and the car-thief offered him sympathy. The first blind man and his wife agree that their blindness “still seems like a dream,” and then the first blind man navigates the rest of the way to their house. He forgets the address, but fortunately his wife remembers.
In contrast to the peace and cleanliness of the doctor and his wife’s apartment, the city remains in a fallen state, full of the disheveled remains of what used to be civilization. In fact, it resembles the hospital while the protagonists were trapped—to the blind people living there, it may even be indistinguishable. Now that the protagonists are relatively comfortable and secure, they can observe the “dream” they lived before from a more removed and reflective perspective—much like the reader’s position relative to the protagonists.
Themes
When the first blind man, his wife, and the doctor’s wife reach the building, they make their way upstairs to the third floor and knock on the door of the apartment where the first blind man and his wife used to live. A man opens it, and the first blind man explains that he and his wife were the apartment’s previous residents, which they can prove by identifying everything inside. The man who is occupying the flat explains that his wife and two daughters are out searching for food and reveals that he is a writer. The first blind man’s wife asks for his name, but the man replies, “Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.” His books, he explains, might as well “not exist.”
The haunting figure of the writer contrasts starkly with almost all of the other characters in the book: patient and reflective, the writer seems to have held onto the humanity that everyone else has been forced to sacrifice. The writer’s claim that “blind people do not need a name” recalls the point in the novel when the protagonists first entered the hospital and realized that they could no longer distinguish one another except by their voices: without blindness, they lost their sense of identity, and then their humanity. And yet, despite not having any real sense of identity, the writer has sustained his humanity by sustaining his voice.
Themes
The first blind man asks why the writer has moved in, and the writer admits that other people have taken his house. If his old apartment ever empties out, the writer promises, he will move back home, so the first blind man and his wife can get their place back. Otherwise, he offers, they can evict him and take their flat back, or they can move in with him.
The writer moving into the first blind man’s house is a metaphor for the way that writers must occupy other people’s lives, stories, and perspectives in order to do their work. In fact, this is an exercise in the kind of empathy that Saramago consistently argues is the basis for people’s social and therefore moral conscience. However, the writer’s offer that the first blind man and his wife can have their house back shows that adopting and communicating another person’s perspective does not necessarily have to mean stealing it from them—in other words, the same story can have different or ambiguous versions, even from the same perspective.
Themes
The first blind man, his wife, and the doctor’s wife explain that they have recently left quarantine, and the writer asks about it—he wants write a book to preserve their feelings. He shows them his writing, which consists of “tightly compressed lines” in ballpoint pen. He cannot read it, but the doctor’s wife can. The writer asks about the quarantine and apologizes for how ridiculous his own writing is, because everyone has to tell their own story. The doctor’s wife asks to see the writer’s work, and he brings her to his dingy desk and presents about 20 handwritten pages. She touches his shoulder, and he kisses her hand and says, “Don’t lose yourself, don’t let yourself be lost.” Back home, with three days’ worth of food, the doctor’s wife reads her companions a book from the study.
It’s possible that this writer is the novel’s narrator and that the book he plans to write is Blindness. The ambiguity is probably intentional, as it allows Saramago to explore the relationship between the act of writing and the process of defining one’s identity and orienting oneself toward the future. The writer serves as a stark reminder that all stories are written from a specific perspective and that no narrator can ever be entirely omniscient. Indeed, the writer cannot even read his own words, which shows that he is writing not for consumption, but for survival: his goal is to maintain his sanity by expressing himself.
Themes
