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Chapter 14
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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