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 horrific evil. Although people selfishly panic during crises, no situation can completely eliminate their capacity for solidarity and moral conscience. For Saramago, people are both altruistic and selfish, or good and evil, by nature—which means it is up to them and the social structures they create to determine which side will prevail.
Saramago shows that all humans are capable of extreme selfishness and brutal violence. This is apparent from the beginning of the book, when the car-thief steals the first blind man’s car and the Government shuts the blind in abandoned mental hospital, declaring that anyone who leaves the hospital will be shot on sight. Surely enough, the frightened soldiers soon start massacring the blind. Inside the hospital, social organization also exacerbates humanity’s worst tendencies: an armed group of thugs takes control of the wards and starts hoarding all the food, demanding everyone’s valuables, and raping all the women in the hospital. Saramago describes these rapes in graphic detail, forcing the reader to confront the profundity of humankind’s capacity for violence and the frightening possibility that society might enable rather than repress these violent instincts. Ultimately, even the book’s most altruistic and sympathetic character—the doctor’s wife—is forced to abandon her principles because of circumstances: at the end of the book, she steals food from blind worshippers in a church in order to feed the other protagonists.
Nevertheless, the doctor’s wife proves more than anyone else that people retain their capacity for goodness even in the darkest situations. She feigns blindness to follow her husband to the quarantined hospital, where she cares for, cleans, and defends the other internees. After the patients leave the hospital, she houses, feeds, and guides them. But she does not do this because she is uniquely benevolent: rather, she feels a sense of moral obligation because she is the only person who can still see. Her moral conscience holds the group together, proving that people retain the capacity for cooperation and selflessness even in the darkest circumstances. Other characters also demonstrate Saramago’s faith in altruism and love: the girl with the glasses and the old man with the eyepatch fall in love and agree to stay together once they regain their sight, although they are separated by decades and the old man fears that the girl will abandon him once she sees that he is wrinkly, ugly, and bald. The old man talks people through moral crises in the hospital, and the doctor gives them what little medical advice he can muster. Even the soldiers occasionally show a deep inner humanity: when one of them tries to trick a terrified blind man into approaching the hospital’s front gate so that he has an excuse to shoot, the sergeant reprimands the soldier and directs the blind man back inside. The sergeant sees the hopeless blind man as a human being worth protecting, even though his job is predicated on viewing the blind as afflicted enemies. This shows that humanity’s capacity for good is just as profound as its capacity for evil, especially in extreme circumstances.
Ultimately, Saramago suggests that this choice between good and evil depends on people’s social instincts, or their moral regard for others: when they view others as equals whose interests must be taken seriously, people harness the best instincts of humanity, but if they conceive themselves as superior to others and their desires as more important than others’, they commit evil and brutality. For instance, the Government and the soldiers justify shooting and denying resources to the blind by comparing them to animals and telling themselves that the blind need to be scarified to prevent the epidemic from spreading. In other words, they decide that the blind prisoners are less than human and unworthy of fundamental rights, even though they would never accept that treatment if they were blind themselves. (Ironically, the soldiers soon go blind as well, along with the rest of the city.) On the other hand, certain characters—like the doctor’s wife and the old man—insist on seeing everyone’s humanity, even in the darkest circumstances. This is why the doctor’s wife cries when she sees the other protagonists soil themselves in public and the old man is overcome with delight when he smells the women bathing themselves and realizes “that there [is] still life in the world”: the doctor’s wife sees people’s humanity when they have ceased to acknowledge their own, and the old man is learning to see this humanity again. While the soldiers and thugs generally refuse to see a reflection of their own humanity in the people over whom they have power, and therefore exploit and brutalize those other people, the doctor’s wife and the old man insist on seeing others as human—even when they have been reduced to filth and starvation—and they ruthlessly defend those others’ dignity.
Accordingly, Saramago doesn’t think that people are inherently benevolent and that society is inevitably good for them, nor that people are naturally wicked and can only ever hope to protect themselves from harm. Rather, he sees human beings and societies as having unlimited capacities for both benevolence and wickedness: people can integrate their interests with other people’s or reject others’ humanity, depending on the circumstances and social pressures that shape their moral conscience.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience ThemeTracker
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience Quotes in Blindness
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.
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.
The word Attention was uttered three times, then the voice began, the Government regrets having been forced to exercise with all urgency what it considers to be its rightful duty, to protect the population by all possible means in this present crisis, when something with all the appearance of an epidemic of blindness has broken out, provisionally known as the white sickness, and we are relying on the public spirit and cooperation of all citizens to stem any further contagion, assuming that we are dealing with a contagious disease and that we are not simply witnessing a series of as yet inexplicable coincidences. The decision to gather together in one place all those infected, and, in adjacent but separate quarters all those who have had any kind of contact with them, was not taken without careful consideration. The Government is fully aware of its responsibilities and hopes that those to whom this message is directed will, as the upright citizens they doubtless are, also assume their responsibilities, bearing in mind that the isolation in which they now find themselves will represent, above any personal considerations, an act of solidarity with the rest of the nation's community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today is today, tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, today is my responsibility, not tomorrow if I should turn blind, What do you mean by responsibility, The responsibility of having my eyesight when others have lost theirs, You cannot hope to guide or provide food for all the blind people in this world, I ought to, But you cannot, I shall do whatever I can to help, Of course you will, had it nor been for you I might not be alive today, And I don't want you to die now.
Most likely other blind people closed it, converting the basement into an enormous tomb and I am to blame for what happened, when I came running out of there with my bags, they must have suspected that it was food and went in search of it, In a way, everything we eat has been stolen from the mouths of others and if we rob them of too much we are responsible for their death, one way or another we are all murderers.
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.
