Blindness

Blindness

by

José Saramago

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Blindness makes teaching easy.
Themes and Colors
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy Theme Icon
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience Theme Icon
Biological Needs and Human Society Theme Icon
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Blindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Biological Needs and Human Society Theme Icon

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, policemen, taxi-drivers, prostitutes, children, and so on—become simply “the blind,” undifferentiated in function and indistinguishable from one another. However, Saramago’s point is not merely to show that human society is complex and fragile. Rather, by erasing the society that humans developed in order to meet their specific biological needs, Saramago demonstrates that people can never truly free themselves from these needs: no matter how sincerely we believe ourselves to be the most rational and sophisticated of all animals, we are still animals like any other.

The epidemic of “white sickness” shows how contemporary human life is designed to automate and distance people from their biological needs through technology. The novel begins with a traffic light, which embodies society’s dependence on technology. When one car does not advance, breaking the accepted social rule, the other drivers lash out. But they soon learn that the stopped car’s driver has gone blind, and the rest of the city soon follows. Blindness becomes a norm, creating something like a temporary alteration in human biology: human society is organized around sight, without which people’s social norms and identities collapse entirely. So while the traffic light is initially a universally recognizable and authoritative symbol, it later comes to represent a social order that, while highly complex and developed, was based entirely on a random quirk of human biology: the human eye. Without functioning eyes, people lack uses for the stoplight and many other technologies that previously seemed essential: abandoned cars fill the city, and the protagonists briefly camp out in a store full of electric appliances that they complain cannot “be eaten or worn.” Similarly, while people initially rob banks during the outbreak, money soon becomes useless, which also shows how human society—while built to serve people’s fundamental needs—actually often distracts from those needs. This does not mean human technology is completely useless. One kind of technology, in particular, is designed specifically to help modify and improve humans’ biological resilience: medicine. And yet, in this book, medicine fails to achieve its goals: not only does the ophthalmologist have no idea why the first blind man has lost his sight, but the doctor himself soon becomes blind, too.

However, the frivolity of modern society does not change the fundamental importance of human biology. When public services and social norms evaporate, Saramago shows how this biology takes over and people are reduced to their animal nature. In the quarantined hospital, it is hard to miss the constant depictions of blood, disease, body odor, insect infestation, and especially feces: since the blind cannot reliably find their way to the lavatory or see one another if they defecate outdoors, the entire building eventually becomes covered with an “endless carpet of trampled excrement.” Saramago constantly returns to the smells, textures, and sounds of a hospital full of starving blind people covered in their own filth. He does this not to shock readers, but rather to emphasize that people’s bodily functions are one of the few constants in human life, which makes this biology more essential than people’s identities, jobs, relationships, institutions, technology, and even vision, all of which can disappear without affecting people’s fundamental nature. Similarly, in the hospital, the blind quickly become preoccupied with one thing: food. They steal, hoard, and even kill for it; everything else loses value in comparison, because food is a fundamental need that must be met before any other human need becomes worth pursuing. When the internees are fed, they often next seek out sex and companionship. (But notably, they do this outside the confines of traditional gender roles—for instance, the doctor’s wife becomes a killer, breadwinner, and caregiver all at once—which suggests that such gender roles are just another kind of contingent, fragile social distinction that falls apart under crisis.) Once the blind internees leave the hospital and start living out in the city, they realize that they have been living in the same circumstances as everybody else: people have left their homes and started wandering around the city in groups, looking for food and sleeping wherever they happen to find shelter. In other words, blindness has served as a great equalizer, and there is no longer any difference between the people inside or outside the hospital—just as all people, regardless of status or identity, are united by the same basic needs and biological functions.

In fact, when society disintegrates, the blind not only become the same as all other people: they also become the same as other animals. When interned in the hospital, the blind frequently comment that they feel like animals, and once they make it out into the city, they search the city for anything they can possibly eat alongside packs of dogs that do the exact same thing. When the doctor’s wife gets lost, she is saved not by a human, but by a dog who licks up her tears and soon becomes part of her family. The narrator even calls the “dog of tears” an “animal of the human type,” which makes it absolutely clear that Saramago rejects the notion that humans are inherently superior to or meant to rule over the rest of the animal kingdom. Rather, humans are a certain kind of animal that have developed a certain kind of society around our specific biological needs—but the ripple effects of blindness show that this biological nature is a product of evolutionary history, which could have been different and could even change in the future, and that society is a product of the quirks of human biology.

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…

Biological Needs and Human Society ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Biological Needs and Human Society appears in each chapter of Blindness. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire Blindness LitChart as a printable PDF.
Blindness PDF

Biological Needs and Human Society Quotes in Blindness

Below you will find the important quotes in Blindness related to the theme of Biological Needs and Human Society.
Chapter 1 Quotes

The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leaving their cars at the ready, advancing, retreating like nervous horses that can sense the whiplash about to be inflicted. The pedestrians have just finished crossing but the sign allowing the cars to go will be delayed for some seconds, some people maintain that this delay, while apparently so insignificant, has only to be multiplied by the thousands of traffic lights that exist in the city and by the successive changes of their three colours to produce one of the most serious causes of traffic jams or bottlenecks, to use the more current term.

Related Characters: The narrator (speaker), The first blind man
Related Symbols: Cars, Blindness and Sight
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

We're so remote from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us, no dog recognises another dog or knows the others by the names they have been given, a dog is identified by its scent and that is how it identifies others, here we are like another breed of dogs, we know each other’s bark or speech, as for the rest, features, colour of eyes or hair, they are of no importance, it is as if they did not exist.

Related Characters: The doctor’s wife (speaker)
Related Symbols: Blindness and Sight
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

The soldiers would have liked to aim their weapons and, without compunction, shoot down those imbeciles moving before their eyes like lame crabs, waving their unsteady pincers in search of their missing leg. They knew what had been said in the barracks that morning by the regimental commander, that the problem of these blind internees could be resolved only by physically wiping out the lot of them, those already there and those still to come, without any phoney humanitarian considerations, his very words, just as one amputates a gangrenous limb in order to save the rest of the body, The rabies of a dead dog, he said, to illustrate the point, is cured by nature. For some of the soldiers, less sensitive to the beauties of figurative language, it was difficult to understand what a dog with rabies had to do with the blind, but the word of a regimental commander, once again figuratively speaking, is worth its weight in gold, no man rises to so high a rank in the army without being right in everything he thinks, says and does.

Related Characters: The narrator (speaker), The soldiers
Related Symbols: Blindness and Sight, Guns, The Mental Hospital
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Arriving at this point, the blind accountant, tired of describing so much misery and sorrow, would let his metal punch fall to the table, he would search with a trembling hand for the piece of stale bread he had put to one side while he fulfilled his obligations as chronicler of the end of time, but he would not find it, because another blind man, whose sense of smell had become very keen out of dire necessity, had filched it. Then, renouncing his fraternal gesture, the altruistic impulse that had brought him rushing to this side, the blind accountant would decide that the best course of action, if he was still in time, was to return to the third ward on the left, there, at least, however much the injustices of those hoodlums stirred up in him feelings of honest indignation, he would not go hungry.

Related Characters: The narrator (speaker), The doctor / ophthalmologist, The blind accountant
Related Symbols: Blindness and Sight, The Mental Hospital
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

All I know is that we would never have found ourselves in this situation if their leader hadn't been killed, what did it matter if the women had to go there twice a month to give these men what nature gave them to give, I ask myself. Some found this amusing, some forced a smile, those inclined to protest were deterred by an empty stomach, and the same man insisted, What I'd like to know is who did the stabbing, The women who were there at the time swear it was none of them, What we ought to do is to take the law into our own hands and bring the culprit to justice, If we knew who was responsible, we'd say this is the person you're looking for, now give us the food, If we knew who was responsible.

Related Characters: The doctor’s wife, The old man with the black eyepatch, The leader of the thugs, The soldiers
Related Symbols: The Mental Hospital
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

She now closed [the door] carefully behind her only to find herself plunged into total darkness, as sightless as those blind people out there, the only difference was in the colour, if black and white can, strictly speaking, be thought of as colours. […] I'm going mad, she thought, and with good reason, making this descent into a dark pit, without light or any hope of seeing any, how far would it be, these underground stores are usually never very deep, first flight of steps, Now I know what it means to be blind, second flight of steps, I'm going to scream, I'm going to scream, third set of steps, the darkness is like a thick paste that sticks to her face, her eyes transformed into balls of pitch.

Related Characters: The doctor’s wife (speaker), The narrator (speaker)
Related Symbols: Blindness and Sight
Page Number: 229
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

What's the world like these days, the old man with the black eyepatch had asked, and the doctor’s wife replied, There's no difference between inside and outside, between here and there, between the many and the few, between what we're living through and what we shall have to live through, And the people, how are they coping, asked the girl with dark glasses, They go around like ghosts, this must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it, Are there lots of cars out there, asked the first blind man, who was unable to forget that his had been stolen, It s like a cemetery. Neither the doctor nor the wife of the first blind man asked any questions, what was the point, when the replies were such as these.

Related Characters: The doctor’s wife (speaker), The girl with the dark glasses (speaker), The old man with the black eyepatch (speaker), The first blind man (speaker), The doctor / ophthalmologist, The first blind man’s wife, The little boy with the squint
Related Symbols: Blindness and Sight, Cars
Page Number: 242
Explanation and Analysis: