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 is transformed into a quarantine zone, is also an allegory for the various ways in which real people, although literally capable of sight, are metaphorically blind about the nature of their existence. Specifically, Saramago suggests that people are blind in their limited control over their lives: they can neither fully understand why events happen (like this mass epidemic of blindness) nor know with any certainty what will happen to them in the future. At the same time, the novel shows that people can learn to “see” by accepting this uncertain human condition and taking responsibility for their own existence.
In this book, literal blindness is a metaphor for characters’ general disorientation in the world. The blindness strikes its first victim suddenly and inexplicably. But when this first bland man visits the doctor, nothing appears to be wrong: the man’s “eyes are perfect” and his “blindness […] defies explanation.” In other words, even the doctor is blind to what causes the condition; its sudden appearance represents the inexplicability of many of the most important events that define and give meaning to people’s lives. The spread of blindness also “defies explanation” throughout the novel: people suddenly find themselves blind while they go about their everyday routines. In most cases, they are struck blind just after developing an intense fear of blindness, which implies that perhaps fearing the unknown is self-fulfilling in that such anxiety actually brings on what it is that people fear. One victim even calls the blindness a “spiritual malaise,” a reflection of people’s deepest feelings and emotions—indeed, the white blindness leaves no external signs on its victims, although such external characteristics also lose their meaning and importance. Unable to distinguish between people who can and cannot see, the seeing move through the world terrified of being struck blind, and the blind are completely uncertain of who and what surrounds them. Indeed, like the blind in this book, people more generally are “certain that life exists” but “unable to see it,” despite external appearances. In this way, Saramago suggests that people often drift through unfulfilling and alienating lives, secretly crippled by uncertainty and waiting for a sense of direction or purpose to strike them.
The protagonists’ blindness forces them to make sense of the world and their place in it in new ways, both figuratively and literally. They must rely on other senses in order to navigate, communicate, and understand the world—for instance, they start traveling along walls and identifying people by their voices. But they also lose their individual identities and their ability to grasp others’. By simply juxtaposing dialogue without quotation marks or attribution, Saramago shows readers how the blind lose track of speakers and names. Indeed, the writer (who moves into the first blind man’s apartment when the man and his wife are in quarantine) articulates why the characters go unnamed: “blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.” In short, when faced with their affliction, the blind stop trying to define their identities—instead, they undertake a spiritual reckoning as they struggle to understand what happened to them and maintain the hope of regaining their sight. In quarantine, the doctor’s wife insists that the blindness “cannot last forever,” which “would be horrible,” but one of the other patients, the girl with the dark glasses, believes that the blindness is permanent and that “there is no salvation.” These different perspectives on hope and recovery show how humans will inevitably choose a stance about their uncertain future without knowing if their choices will ever pay off.
In fact, the sensory, social, and spiritual reorientation that the novel’s characters undergo in order to cope with their blindness is what leads them to truly understand their existence: losing their literal sight lets them figuratively “see.” The novel ends with a dramatic and inexplicable reversal of fortune: just as suddenly as the protagonists lost their sight, they mysteriously regain it. This happens just when the world appears to be on the brink of collapse: the city is littered with trash and corpses, its blind and starving residents congregate in public to listen to sermons and political speeches, and the protagonists are planning to move to the countryside. The doctor and his wife stumble into a church full of blind worshippers, and the doctor’s wife reveals that all the idols, statues, and figures inside have their eyes painted over or covered. When the crowd hears about this sacrilege, they riot and flee. But the doctor praises whomever covered the images’ eyes as proposing “the fairest and most radically human” religion of all: one in which higher powers are just as lost as human beings, and so even “God does not deserve to see.” That night, as though reaping a reward for recognizing that not even God can give meaning to their lives or afflictions, the characters start suddenly regaining their sight. After they do, the doctor comments, “I don’t think we go blind, I think we are blind […] Blind people who can see, but do not see.” He sees the white blindness as a manifestation of the deeper, atheistic truth that people start out blind, without inherent purpose or direction, but they can learn to see—or take control of their existence—through their own volition. The novel’s protagonists only understand this essential autonomy after their blindness shows them the starkest realities of human nature, tests their resolve to survive, and ultimately leads them to meaningful, loving relationships. In other words, blindness shows the protagonists that they are fundamentally responsible for their own salvation, even though they live in an inexplicable and unpredictable reality.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy ThemeTracker
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy Quotes in Blindness
The blind man raised his hands to his eyes and gestured, Nothing, it’s as if I were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea. But blindness isn't like that, said the other fellow, they say that blindness is black, Well I see everything white.
Let’s wait and see, let's wait and see, you mustn't despair.
The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed, it was not an invention of the philosophers of the Quaternary when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition. With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the colour of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the result that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny. Add to this general observation, the particular circumstance that in simple spirits, the remorse caused by committing some evil act often becomes confused with ancestral fears of every kind, and the result will be that the punishment of the prevaricator ends up being, without mercy or pity, twice what he deserved.
When she rejoined her husband, she asked him, Can you imagine where they've brought us, No, she was about to add, To a mental asylum, but he anticipated her, You're not blind, I cannot allow you to stay here, Yes, you're right, I'm not blind, Then I'm going to ask them to take you home, to tell them that you told a lie in order to remain with me, There's no point, they cannot hear you through there, and even if they could, they would pay no attention, But you can see, For the moment, I shall almost certainly turn blind myself one of these days, or any minute now, Please, go home, Don't insist, besides, I'll bet the soldiers would not let me get as far as the stairs, I cannot force you, No, my love, you can't, I'm staying to help you and the others who may come here, but don't tell them I can see, What others, You surely don't think we shall be here on our own, This is madness, What did you expect, we're in a mental asylum.
But this blindness is so abnormal, so alien to scientific knowledge that it cannot last forever. And suppose we were to stay like this for the rest of our lives, Us, Everyone, That would be horrible, a world full of blind people, It doesn't bear thinking about.
It was my fault, she sobbed, and it was true, no one could deny it, but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin by weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probable, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt. The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality, Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.
She had blood on her hands and clothes, and suddenly her exhausted body told her that she was old, Old and a murderess, she thought, but she knew that if it were necessary she would kill again, And when is it necessary to kill, she asked herself as she headed in the direction of the hallway, and she herself answered the question, When what is still alive is already dead. She shook her head and thought, And what does that mean, words, nothing but words.
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.
Say to a blind man, you're free, open the door that was separating him from the world, Go, you are free, we tell him once more, and he does not go, he has remained motionless there in the middle of the road, he and the others, they are terrified, they do not know where to go, the fact is that there is no comparison between living in a rational labyrinth, which is, by definition, a mental asylum and venturing forth, without a guiding hand or a dog-leash, into the demented labyrinth of the city where memory will serve no purpose, for it will merely be able to recall the images of places but not the paths whereby we might get there. Standing in front of the building which is already ablaze from end to end, the blind inmates can feel the living waves of heat from the fire on their faces, they receive them as something which in a way protects them, just as the walls did before, prison and refuge at once. They stay together, pressed up against each other, like a flock, no one there wants to be the lost sheep, for they know that no shepherd will come looking for them.
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.
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.
All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
On their way to the home of the girl with dark glasses, they crossed a large square with groups of blind people who were listening to speeches from other blind people, at first sight, neither one nor the other group seemed blind, the speakers turned their heads excitedly towards their listeners, the listeners turned their heads attentively to the speakers. They were proclaiming the end of the world, redemption through penitence, the visions of the seventh day, the advent of the angel, cosmic collisions, the death of the sun, the tribal spirit, the sap of the mandrake, tiger ointment, the virtue of the sign, the discipline of the wind, the perfume of the moon, the revindication of darkness, the power of exorcism, the sign of the heel, the crucifixion of the rose, the purity of the lymph, the blood of the black cat, the sleep of the shadow the rising of the seas, the logic of anthropophagy, painless castration, divine tattoos, voluntary blindness, convex thoughts, or concave, or horizontal or vertical, or sloping, or concentrated, or dispersed, or fleeting, the weakening of the vocal cords, the death of the word, Here nobody is speaking of organisation, said the doctor's wife, Perhaps organisation is in another square, he replied. They continued on their way.
If the priest covered the eyes of the images, That s just my idea, It's the only hypothesis that makes any sense, it's the only one that can lend some dignity to our suffering […] that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see.
Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
