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Chapter 16
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
In the morning, the doctor’s wife tells the doctor that the group is almost out of food, so she needs to make another run to the supermarket store room. She remarks that caring for the others has worn her out, but she will keep persevering as long as she’s able. She and the doctor start bickering about why the doctor had sex with the girl with the glasses in the hospital, but then they go to breakfast. After eating, they go outside with the dog of tears and find the city even filthier and more dilapidated than before. Out of empathy and despair, the dog of tears howls at a corpse. The group again passes a crowd listening to blind speakers in a square, but this time, they are talking about “great organized systems” like the free market, and the criminal justice system, the military, and the government.
Saramago emphasizes that the doctor’s wife is a regular person acting out of a sense of moral responsibility, not a superhuman savior or messiah acting out of divine inspiration. Having spent the last several chapters leading the rest of the characters, the doctor’s wife admits that she is exhausted and that the burdens of her newfound job are difficult to carry. Indeed, this fear of responsibility—of being enslaved to others because of her extraordinary capacity to see—was what initially prevented her from taking decisive action in the hospital. The proto-political rally they pass in the square this time is a clear foil for the preacher they passed in the previous chapter, and this makes explicit Saramago’s comparison between religion and social organization (or politics) as different ways of giving meaning to human life. However, there is also an important difference between the distant, repressive Government in the novel and the kind of organic, small-scale community that the protagonists have formed. But Saramago leaves open the question of whether it is possible to have an entire society function like a commune, with everyone taking a personal stake in the wellbeing of everyone else.
Active
Themes
The doctor’s wife checks the same street map where she first encountered the dog of tears, and then she leads her husband and the dog to the supermarket two blocks away. The doctor’s wife comments that nobody is entering or exiting and worries that the blind might have already cleared out the storeroom. A group of blind people next to her is confused to hear her talk about seeing, but they brush it off as a figure of speech. Inside, the supermarket is empty—both of food and people—and it smells like death. The dog whimpers anxiously as he follows the doctor and his wife to the door leading to the basement, where the smell only gets worse.
After passing by the site where she had her own breakdown and then was saved by the dog of tears, the doctor’s wife begins to reflect on her decision to say nothing about the supermarket’s basement storeroom. Just like the last time she entered the supermarket, here the doctor’s wife guides herself by smell—just as her blind companions have been doing throughout the book. In fact, the forbidding stench that she encounters here suggests that something is horribly wrong.
Active
Themes
The doctor’s wife tells the doctor to wait upstairs while she goes down to the basement. On the staircase, the rotting stench makes the doctor’s wife vomit, and then she sees two low, flickering lights. The doctor rushes over to comfort her and lead her back into the hallway, where starts crying hysterically. She exclaims that “they are dead” and then explains that the blind must have fallen down the stairs in a pile before someone closed the door behind them, and that now the basement is essentially a mass grave. The doctor’s wife blames herself for this, because the blind probably went downstairs just after she ran outside. She concludes that all their food has essentially been stolen from others, meaning that they’re indirectly responsible for their deaths. She questions why her group has survived and worries that soon it will all come to an end.
Outside the supermarket, the doctor’s wife realizes that she needs to lie down, and she spots a church across the street that would be “a good place to rest.” The doctor guides his wife across the street, where she helps him climb the six steps to the church’s front door. Knowing that dogs aren’t allowed inside churches, the dog of tears hesitates but enters, nonetheless. The church is completely packed with people, but the dog growls at some blind people so that they make space for the doctor’s wife, who lays down and loses consciousness. The doctor sits her up to improve her circulation, and she slowly wakes up and starts to see again.
Active
Themes
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When she comes to her senses, the doctor’s wife sees that the eyes of all the images in the church are covered with paint or strips of cloth, except for one woman who has gouged-out eyes that she carries on a tray. The doctor’s wife tells the doctor about this, and they wonder whether someone who lost their faith might have covered the images’ eyes out of spite, or if the local priest decided that the images should be blind like everyone else. The doctor’s wife claims that she is also going blind now that there is nobody left to see her. She and the doctor wonder whether the blindfolds dignify their suffering and conclude that this is “the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human.” The priest who did this is, the doctor says, was essentially making the statement that not even God should be allowed to see.
The blind people surrounding the doctor’s wife and the doctor begin to ask about the covered images and question how the doctor’s wife knows about them. As news spreads around the church, people are dubious but alarmed. The people start to scream in horror, and they panic and collectively flee the church. Meanwhile, the doctor and his wife “take advantage of the misfortune of others” by stealing some of the food that the escaped worshippers left behind.
Active
Themes
Back at the doctor and his wife’s house, their companions are shocked and dismayed to hear about their day, but they have different feelings about the blinded images in the church: the first blind man and his wife consider it inexcusably disrespectful, while the man with the eyepatch finds it humorous. The group eats the food that the doctor and his wife have brought home and start planning to abandon the city and go to the countryside instead, where food is more abundant. In the evening, although there is no food, the group still crowds around the doctor’s wife to listen to her read.
Active
Themes
While the doctor’s wife reads, some of the others drift off to sleep. The first blind man has his eyes closed, but he’s preoccupied with the plan to move to the countryside. When he starts seeing dark instead of white, he thinks he has fallen asleep, and then that he has gone from white-blind to dark-blind. He tells the first blind man’s wife that he is blind, and then he opens his eyes and starts yelling out that he can see. After embracing his wife, he hugs all of his other companions, most of whom he is seeing for the first time. The doctor remarks that perhaps the blindness is coming to an end and that they’ll all regain their eyesight. The doctor’s wife starts crying out of joy, and the dog of tears goes over to lick up her tears.
Active
Themes
The group starts chattering anxiously, and the first blind man and his wife plan their return home. A few hours later, the girl with the glasses also starts seeing again. She immediately embraces the doctor’s wife and then goes to the man with the eyepatch and resolves to stay with him even though she now sees that he is wrinkly and bald. In the morning, the doctor is able to see, and people outside start triumphantly yelling that they can see, too. In this atmosphere of celebration, the protagonists’ memories of going blind feel alien. Still, the protagonists wonder if they’ll ever learn why they went blind, and one of them suggests that they didn’t really go blind—rather, they were already “blind people who can see, but do not see.” Looking out the window, the doctor’s wife wonders if she will now go blind—but she does not.
