Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy
In José Saramago’s philosophical novel Blindness, an unnamed city’s residents start suddenly and inexplicably losing their sight. Rather than pure darkness, they see “impenetrable whiteness,” and their blindness appears to be contagious: in a matter of weeks, the entire city loses its sight—except, it seems, for the doctor’s wife, who becomes the novel’s main protagonist. This mysterious epidemic of “white blindness,” which brings Saramago’s protagonists together in an abandoned mental hospital that…
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Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience
Mysteriously struck blind, locked up in an abandoned mental hospital, and forced to fend for themselves, Saramago’s characters quickly come face to face with the ugliest aspects of human nature: they compete for scarce food, soldiers slaughter them, and armed thugs starve them and repeatedly rape the women. But Saramago does not think that people are inevitably selfish: rather, he suggests that they are capable of as much radical good as they are…
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Biological Needs and Human Society
From plumbing to supermarkets, many of humankind’s most prized inventions are designed to distance people from their basic biological needs: food, water, shelter, excretion, and so on. But in Blindness, as “the white sickness” of unexplained blindness ravages the unnamed city, the people who run society’s complex systems stop doing their jobs, and everyone else must completely dedicate themselves to meeting their basic biological needs. Throughout the city, people of all walks of life—doctors…
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Narrative, Ideology, and Identity
Throughout Blindness, Saramago’s characters struggle to understand what has happened to them and their city. Faced with inexplicable and unconscionable circumstances as the population is struck with a mysterious epidemic of blindness, they give meaning to their lives through narratives that often end up defining their identities and commitments in ways they might not have expected. Saramago thus shows how the narratives people choose to tell themselves can empower to define their identities…
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