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
An unsuspecting police officers takes the car-thief home, and the thief’s wife realizes that her husband has not merely been caught stealing—she thinks that something much worse must have happened. Similarly, a policeman brings the girl with the dark glasses home to her parents’ apartment, but the girl is “overcome with embarrassment” to have been discovered naked and kicked out of the hotel after the staff heard her “piercing shrieks.” The officer makes her pay for her taxi home, and the girl wonders if her blindness is punishment “for her immorality.” Meanwhile, the ophthalmologist does not give in to despair—rather, he lays silently in bed, pondering what to tell people and nervously awaiting morning, which he knows he won’t be able to see. Tomorrow, he must “inform the health authorities” about the potential catastrophic epidemic that “highly contagious,” sudden blindness could create.
The obvious contrast between how the police treat the car-thief and how they treat the girl with the glasses underlines Saramago’s critique of conventional morality. Namely, the police are blind to the car-thief’s actual crime and treat him as an unfortunate victim, while they see the girl’s consensual sexual liaison as irredeemable and treat her as a criminal under arrest. The reader knows that it is really the other way around, and so it becomes clear that society’s conventions are actually enforcing the opposite of morality. The doctor, on the other hand, seems to act out of a private moral impulse to save others: even though the blindness has caused him a personal tragedy, he only thinks about the societal implications of a potential epidemic and is not at all preoccupied with his own well-being.
Themes
In the morning, the doctor pretends he’s asleep as the doctor’s wife kisses his forehead, and then he cries because he now understands what his patients most fear. After the doctor makes it to the bathroom, his wife returns, and the doctor reveals that he’s having trouble seeing. His wife looks into his eyes but doesn’t observe anything wrong. The doctor replies that his vision is completely gone and that the blind man who came to his office must have “infected” him. Even though his wife knows that blindness isn’t contagious, she does not question this—she merely asks what must be done. But suddenly, the doctor forcefully pushes her away because he realizes that she could catch the blindness from him. He calls himself foolish and asks his wife to leave, but she refuses.
Blindness inverts the doctor’s defining trait: his world is now defined by his vision problem, and he is no longer able to cure others. This mysterious blindness forces him to empathize with his patients: although he consults them every day, he has never fully understood how they felt precisely because he always approaches these interactions through the defined social role of his job. Now forced to abandon that role, he empathizes with the disorientation of blindness and the uncertainty of illness for the first time. His belated realization that he might infect his wife—even while he spent the whole night worrying about the rise of an epidemic—shows that he is still reorienting his thinking, but also that he sincerely loves his wife and refuses to let her put his comfort above her own wellbeing.
Themes
The doctor’s wife insists that the doctor eat breakfast. After the doctor finishes his meal, he calls the Ministry of Health and asks to speak with “someone in authority.” But the person on the other end of the line demands details, decides that the man must not really be a doctor, and hangs up. After ruminating for a few minutes, the doctor decides to call his own boss at the hospital and tell him everything. The hospital director is surprised but uncertain: they have no proof that the blindness is contagious, and he warns the doctor against making assumptions. But after a half hour, the director calls back to report that a little boy who visited the doctor’s office the day before “has also suddenly gone blind.” The director says that he will inform the Ministry of Health himself.
The Ministry and hospital director’s skepticism of the doctor exemplifies the figurative blindness of organized social institutions, which are incapable of coping with events that are far outside the ordinary. Specifically, bureaucratic organizations’ hierarchical structure and systematized procedures make them slow to accept change and skeptical of dissent. In other words, such organizations have dangerous blind spots that can make them act immorally or worsen rather than resolve crises. Ultimately, though, the case of the boy confirms the doctor’s expert assessment of the situation. The doctor has performed his civic duty, and matters are now out of his hands.
Themes
Three hours later, the doctor gets a call from the Ministry of Health, which asks for his files and tells him not to leave his house. After a few minutes, the hospital director calls again to report two more cases of sudden blindness: the car thief and the girl with the glasses. Finally, that evening, the Ministry calls the doctor to report that they are sending an ambulance for him. The doctor’s wife readies his suitcase, but the doctor does not know that she is also packing her own clothes—she plans to go with him. After an hour, the ambulance arrives, and the doctor and his wife go downstairs and climb in the back. The ambulance driver protests that the doctor’s wife cannot join him, but she says that she needs to be taken as well—she, too, has just gone blind.
The doctor heads into an unexpected and deeply uncertain future in a quarantine zone that has not even been defined yet. Although the budding epidemic was entirely in his hands just a few hours ago, now the doctor is deprived of all agency and forced to simply obey the Ministry’s directives. His lifetime of specialized medical experience becomes irrelevant—now, he is nothing more than one patient among others. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether the doctor’s wife is telling the truth about going blind. After all, nobody can know whether she is really blind or not since the illness has no external markers. If the doctor’s moral purity and sense of selfless responsibility are any indication of his wife, she may be prepared to take extreme measures to stay with her husband.
Themes
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