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
At first, the internees satisfy their bathroom-related needs without conflict. But with the hospital full, “the filth” is indescribable: the bathrooms clog up, and the internees start defecating in the hallways and courtyard. Soon, these spaces are ridden with excrement that people have stepped in. The doctor’s wife desperately wants to resolve this nightmare, but the doctor warns that she cannot reveal that she can still see—it would be too dangerous. His wife insists that she has to help, but he warns that the hospital is a “harsh, cruel, implacable kingdom,” and that people without eyes are like people without souls. Still, the doctor’s wife decides that in the morning, she will reveal that she can see.
Having finally accepted that she has a moral obligation to address the situation, no matter how much it horrifies her, the doctor’s wife finally decides to act. The passage’s description of “filth” and “excrement” is intentionally hard to stomach—Saramago wants his readers to confront the ugly and disgusting yet fundamental dimensions of human life. Human society is specifically designed to whisk away and hide bodily functions. However, when society falls apart, these basic biological facts of human nature—the things that unite us with the rest of nature’s “kingdom”— become unavoidable.
Themes
In the morning, the doctor’s wife wonders whether she should admit that she has been seeing all along or pretend that she’s regained her sight after being blind like everyone else. Overcome by the stench of the hospital’s unwashed residents and their feces, however, she starts to wonder whether she can really clean things up: the plumbing is broken, and she can’t fix everything on her own.
Caught between her sense of moral responsibility to the other internees and her paralyzing sense of incapacity, the doctor’s wife points out that heroes never truly act alone—they only act with the support of a social fabric.
Themes
Some of the internees go to retrieve the food—although they always fight over it, they have developed a regular system for everyone to get their share. However, today, the men who retrieve the food come running back to report that another group of internees have seized all the food and prevented the men from taking any—they demands payment from anyone who wants to eat. This group of “thieves” is large, and they’re armed with clubs of some sort.
Just like the soldiers standing guard outside, the “thieves” seize power the old-fashioned way: with brute physical force. As such, Saramago calls into question the nature of the Government that has set up the quarantine in the first place, as it is just as indifferent to its citizens’ wellbeing as the “thieves” are to their fellow internees. The novel seems to imply that this is how all government works: those who have the ability to hoard wealth and control resources have the power to govern, regardless of whether they really deserve that power.
Themes
The doctor, the doctor’s wife, and the pharmacist’s assistant go out to try and negotiate with the thieves, who are armed themselves with sticks as well as metal rods taken from the beds. The armed thieves stand in a circle around the food, beating away the other blind people who are protesting loudly and trying to get to the food. The soldiers ignore these protests in hopes that they all end up killing one another, since this would mean fewer contagious people around. Many of the blind get beaten to the ground, and then the leader of the thieves pulls out a gun and fires into the ceiling. He declares that his gang is taking charge of the food, and that the others have to pay. The doctor’s wife asks how, and the man threatens her and then explains that the blind will pay with “all their valuables.”
The thieves make it clear that they are not interested in negotiating or establishing a system based on consent—they do not think the others have any legitimate rights, and they make it clear that the others are their subjects, not their equals. Of course, the soldiers treat the internees the exact same way, and the narrator makes the parallel between the Government and the thugs clear by pointing out that the thieves’ seizure of power benefits the Government: even though it claims that its job is to protect the nation’s citizens, the Government’s actual goal is clearly just to control and suppress the internees, no matter the cost.
Themes
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Everyone returns to the wards, and the doctor and pharmacist’s assistant agree that they must sacrifice their valuables and find a way to make weapons. Anyone without valuables will have to depend on others’ charity. The ward agrees that the doctor will take charge, and he chooses the first blind man to join him. The doctor’s wife empties her bag for them to use to collect everyone’s valuables, and in the process, she discovers a pair of pointed scissors that she does not remember packing. The doctor collects everyone’s things, starting with his own, while his wife hides her scissors by hanging them on a nail in the wall.
The patients recognize the injustice of their situation, but more importantly, they recognize that justice is completely irrelevant to the thieves (as it is to the Government). In their moment of desperation, the ward’s residents turn to the doctor for guidance, but they fail to realize that his competence and expertise are largely the result of guidance from his wife. The doctor’s wife’s scissors, on the other hand, present an opportunity that only she can seize—the thugs have taken power simply because of their weapons, but their blindness will hinder their ability to use them. The doctor’s wife now has a tool capable of overthrowing the thugs, if she can use it correctly and build up the moral courage to act.
Themes
The doctor and the first blind man collect everyone’s things and then go to ward where the thieves are staying. On the way, they comment on the absurdity of the situation and debate whether things will—or even could—get any worse. They wait outside the thieves’ ward while other people give up their goods, and then come up to the ward’s door, where the thieves have propped up a bed as a makeshift “trading counter.” The doctor wonders how many of these “thugs” there are and realizes that, since the leader with the gun has asked someone to “take note,” this means that someone among them is able to write. As the leader assesses the bag of valuables, the sound of paper being punched indicates that someone is recording the amounts in the braille alphabet. This accountant must be “a normal blind person,” meaning that he was blind before the outbreak.
This situation is absurd not only because the thugs are preying on people who have already been reduced to nothing, but also because the “valuables” that the thugs are demanding actually have no value whatsoever inside the hospital. In fact, there is a contradiction at the heart of the thugs’ behavior: they have seized power by ignoring all social conventions and establishing a regime based on brute force, but they are now demanding that the other internees turn over things like money, which has no use or value outside the context of society. Since they are blind, they could not even distinguish one denomination of currency from another. Their greatest asset is the accountant, who is able to harness the technology of writing without his sight. While this shows that different conditions and resources can enable blind people to have capacities that the internees lack—and therefore that life could go on after the blindness epidemic—it also shows how conditions that are conceived as incapacity can actually become a source of power in certain circumstances.
Themes
The accountant and the leader evaluate the ward’s things and give the doctor three containers of food. The doctor complains that it is not enough, but the thug threatens to take some of it away and sticks his gun in the doctor’s neck. The doctor and the first blind man reluctantly take the three containers back to their ward. On the way back, the doctor says that he regrets not grabbing the thug’s gun, but the first blind man suggests that this would have led to a “real war.” When they arrive and explain what happened, the ward’s residents celebrate them as their rightful leaders.
Again, the protagonists’ outrage—and readers’ indignation on their behalf—ultimately achieves nothing: justice and morality are irrelevant to the thugs, who retain absolute authority to do whatever they want, simply because they have a gun. Unfortunately, the doctor’s sense of moral responsibility outpaces his capacity to act: he desperately wants to fight for the oppressed internees but simply has no tools available to him, and his ward’s respect is no match for the thugs’ weapons.
Themes
