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 blind wake up well before dawn, whether because they are hungry, because their internal clocks are broken, or because others wake them up. Realizing that her watch has stopped because she forgot to wind it up, the doctor’s wife starts crying uncontrollably. At first, the doctor assumes she has woken up blind, but she soon explains herself, and the girl with the glasses comes over to try and console her. The doctor’s wife says that she is alright and still has hope for them all, but the girl thinks that “there is no salvation for us” and continues to blame herself for the car-thief’s death. The doctor’s wife helps the girl back into bed, and then a fight breaks out between two men who accidentally switched beds after coming back from the bathroom.
Without their sight, the blind lose their ability to sleep and wake with the sun, a routine that tied them to their previous lives as working members of a complex modern society. Similarly, the doctor’s wife agonizes about her watch falling out of sync not because she cares what time it is, but rather because being able to know the time and follow some semblance of a schedule are signs of normalcy that she can use to stave off the creeping sense of disorientation in quarantine. Still, the contrast between her hope and the girl’s despair shows how people’s orientation toward the future (optimism or pessimism) is independent of the circumstances in which people live.
Themes
Anxious for food, which the soldiers have promised to leave outside, some of the patients wait in the hallway and speculate about whether they might get shot. The other ward’s men still haven’t buried their dead but insist that they won’t do so until after they eat. They debate how to ration the food equally, but each side believes that the other’s proposals are unfair.
Just as the doctor’s wife and the girl with the glasses debate whether they will ever see again, the other patients’ debate about whether the soldiers will kill them reveals how fear and uncertainty structure their sense of self and emotional wellbeing. Their debates about food indicate that they are trying (and failing) to form an organized society in which they can agree on some principle that allows them to put the collective’s interest before each individual’s.
Themes
Over the loudspeaker, “the voice” of the Government announces that the food is being delivered, but that the blind must stay away from the gate or be shot. The internees are afraid, but the voice tells them they have three minutes. They cautiously move outside, and the sergeant guides them to the food containers, which are off to one side. Meanwhile, the soldiers fantasize about shooting the blind, which the regiment’s commander has said would be necessary, sooner or later, to contain the disease. One of the blind men finally reaches the containers, and the others pile on top of him in an effort to carry the food inside for themselves.
Notably, the Government only appears in the novel through this “voice” over the loudspeaker, which underlines the distance from which it makes its life-and-death decisions and amplifies Saramago’s critique of centralized power. The internees’ struggle to find the food containers further shows how they are dehumanized and ridiculed by the Government’s attitude toward them—just as it is possible for blind people to live full and dignified lives, in these circumstances, the Government is turning the blind into the faceless, desperate, animalistic prisoners that the soldiers mortally fear becoming.
Themes
One blind man is clinging to the rope out of fear, but he leaves it to join the chaotic mass of internees looking for the food containers. When the sergeant orders everyone back to the main door, this man cannot find his way to the steps, and the soldiers aim their rifles at him. The sergeant tells them not to shoot, but one of the soldiers urges the man to continue toward him—the man takes three steps before realizing that this soldier is looking for an excuse to shoot him. Fortunately, the sergeant reprimands this soldier and tells the blind man to turn around, which he does. The blind man then follows the commotion made by the other patients to the hospital’s front door.
The bloodthirsty soldier’s attempt to kill the innocent blind man exemplifies the vicious cruelty of the state in this novel, which is enabled and worsened by the system that forces the soldiers and blind internees into opposing roles of guard and prisoner. In other words, the soldiers seem to forget that the blind people inside the hospital have not committed any crime, and their very duties are designed to facilitate this forgetting. The sergeant’s show of human decency is clearly an exception to the rule, but it does show that goodness can be found in even the darkest people and circumstances—just as even seemingly principled and moral people are capable of evil.
Themes
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During this man’s near-death experience, some of the other patients ran away with food containers. The rest split the remainder and formed a “committee” to investigate the stolen food (after eating, of course). The patients who have been waiting in bed note that they heard the thieves run past, and everyone agrees to wait in bed after eating until the thieves return, so that they can be identified. But the internees do not catch anyone, and many of them fall asleep.
While the sergeant manages to save the innocent blind man, the other blind internees take advantage of the profoundly unjust situation in order to secure more resources for themselves. This shows that there is never truly justice in a corrupt circumstance like the one in the novel: when the sergeant rights one wrong, another takes its place.
Themes
The narrator comments that the ward is like a hotel—surely it is better than being blind in the outside world. The narrator even praises the authorities for bringing the blind people together—who “we must organise ourselves,” the narrator says, in order to maintain “self-respect” and avoid getting killed by the guards. The narrator just wishes that the blind had some form of entertainment.
The narrator’s praise for the Government and the hospital is sarcastic, reflecting Saramago’s ongoing critique of corrupt power. Additionally, by referring to themselves, along with the blind, as “ourselves,” the narrator is perhaps conveying that they are also a blind person in the hospital. Alternatively, the narrator may be implying that in some fundamental and spiritual way, all human beings can count themselves among the “blind.”
Themes
There is gunfire outside: the sergeant is trying to frighten the roughly 200 newcomers who are headed into the hospital. There is not enough space, but rather than massacring the blind, they decide to open up all the empty wards to them. The soldiers direct the chaotic mass of people inside, and the new internees spread themselves around the hospital. The contaminated try to prevent the new patients from entering their wards, first by screaming and then by lashing out violently. With most of the internees inside, the front door is blocked off so that nobody else can enter. The soldiers nearly open fire, but the sergeant again stops them.
In a sense, this wave of newcomers forces the reader to see the blind as the soldiers see them: a nameless swarm of people who cease to be individuals and who are now entirely defined by the simple fact that they happen to be blind. This wave, which shows that the Government significantly underestimated the contagiousness of the white blindness, upends the fragile order that used to reign in the hospital. While brutal and prejudiced, the old sergeant at least kept to his principles—he believed that the blind should be shot—as does the new one, who sees unnecessary violence as wrong.
Themes
Gradually, the new internees find their way to the empty ward in the right-hand wing of the hospital, with the other blind people. But space soon runs out, so the new internees spread out in search of beds. Some fight with the contaminated, and others end up in the courtyard, where they come across the five corpses and begin yelling out to the others in shock. In a frenzy, these newcomers break into the wing of the contaminated, who begin suddenly going blind. Injured internees lie around the hallway, along with everyone’s possessions. An old man with an eye patch “wait[s] for peace and silence to be restored” in the courtyard, and when it is, he starts asking around for a bed.
The narrator’s description of the new internees is haunting because it portrays them like a liquid that fills all available space: again, the reader is forced to see the blind from the same dehumanizing perspective that the soldiers and Government take toward them—and that they increasingly take toward one another. The horror of corpses and sudden blindness proves that things can always get worse, and it gives the newcomers little time to adapt to the hospital’s brutal conditions, which the Government has proven it cares little about fixing.
Themes
