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, but also how these very narratives can be rooted in oppressive ideology and shaped by those in power. He ultimately proposes a middle ground between these two tendencies: people should strive to express themselves and navigate their identities through personal narrative, but rather than attempting to conclusively define reality through those narratives, people must accept ambiguity and uncertainty.
Saramago emphasizes that narratives can function as survival mechanisms and help people achieve freedom from oppression. In the hospital, the blind internees “pass the time” by telling stories, which allows them to reclaim their humanity and individuality in an environment where they otherwise seem homogeneous. Later, when the first blind man and the man’s wife visit their old apartment, they find a blind writer living there. This man goes on writing, even though he cannot read his own work, because this is how he preserves his “voice” and maintains his identity during the blindness crisis. While everybody else is desperately wandering the streets, focusing on little besides food and seeking meaning through religion and politics, the writer maintains his decency and composure inside, using narrative as a means of survival.
However, Saramago also emphasizes that stories are always tied up with power and often serve to coerce people into accepting unacceptable circumstances. For example, in quarantine, the Government’s version of events is inconsistent with the blind internees’ actual experience: it announces 15 rules over the loudspeaker, but most of these are never followed (for instance, the Government obligates the blind to bury the dead but does not provide shovels). Its announcements are merely an attempt to create order and justify the Government’s authority despite its complete ignorance about the epidemic. When terrified soldiers massacre a group of blind internees, the Government announces that they were fighting “a seditious movement.” This cover-up shows how the government uses ideology to shape people’s understanding of the world and justify its power. Paradoxically, even the internees accept such ideological narratives, told by the people who oppress them: after the hospital burns down, for instance, they do not celebrate their freedom—rather, they yearn for the soldiers to return and bring them food and order. In fact, the soldiers have long stopped guarding the hospital: the internees could have left at any time, but they remained inside because they took the government’s threats to heart. While the hospital is like a “rational labyrinth” becuase it is familiar, the patients are terrified of being free in the city, which they see as a “demented labyrinth” of uncertainty. Similarly, after the doctor’s wife kills the leader of the thugs who were starving the internees, some of the other internees rebel against her for disrupting the social order.
Having shown how stories both liberate and oppress people, Saramago offers examples of how storytelling can turn into a clash over power and identity. For instance, when the blind internees discuss the last things they remember seeing, one man recalls seeing a painting in a museum. Every time he describes a new aspect of the impossibly complicated artwork, someone shouts out the name of a country where they think the painter must have lived. This person is attempting to hijack the other’s story by turning it into a clean narrative populated by familiar characters playing familiar roles. Meanwhile, the man who saw the painting keeps making up new features so as to maintain control of his narrative, even if the painting starts sounding absurd and impossible. He does not want to perfectly capture the painting in his audience’s eye: he is speaking for himself, not for the others.
For Saramago, such openness to ambiguity and interpretation is what allows a story to liberate someone without oppressing someone else. The blind writer also insists on such a story: he declares that “a writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything.” This is a fitting description of Saramago’s own narrator, too: this narrator constantly tries out different viewpoints, showing how characters have different perspectives on the same events. For example, after describing the soldiers “howling in terror” while massacring blind internees, the narrator declares that these soldiers “reacted admirably in the face of danger,” which is a way of pointing out that they actually acted cowardly and of commenting on the way they might justify their actions to themselves. In this way, Saramago consistently uses irony in order to explore differences in perspective, which undermines the authority of his narrator and opens space for his readers to interpret the book for themselves. For instance, the other internees repeatedly say things like, “if only one of you women could see,” which highlights the dramatic irony at the heart of the narrative: the doctor’s wife still has her sight. Saramago wants his readers to look beyond the narrator, who is neither omnipotent nor confined to a single character’s perspective. When the old man with the eyepatch arrives in the hospital, he tells the others everything he knows about the world outside, but the narrator gives “a reorganized version” of the man’s account, which apparently does not have the “rigour and suitability” the reader deserves. In this passage, Saramago mocks official communications’ tendency to insist on giving an objective and complete account of events, when in reality no such account is possible. But he is also mocking the apparent authority of his own narrator, whom he emphasizes only provides a single and incomplete picture of events. Ultimately, in the alternative model of narrative that Saramago both defends and exemplifies, people accept the limits of their knowledge and the ambiguity of their understanding so that they can narrate their experiences without having to completely define themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity ThemeTracker
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity 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.
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.
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.
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.
From this point onwards, apart from a few inevitable comments, the story of the old man with the black eyepatch will no longer be followed to the letter, being replaced by a reorganised version of his discourse, re-evaluated in the light of a correct and more appropriate vocabulary. The reason for this previously unforeseen change is the rather formal controlled language, used by the narrator, which almost disqualifies him as a complementary reporter, however important he may be, because without him we would have no way of knowing what happened in the outside world, as a complementary reporter, as we were saying, of these extraordinary events, when as we know the description of any facts can only gain with the rigour and suitability of the terms used.
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.
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.
All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
I am a writer, we are supposed to know such things. The first blind man felt flattered, imagine, a writer living in my flat, then a doubt rose in him, was it good manners to ask him his name, he might even have heard of his name, it was even possible that he had read him, he was still hesitating between curiosity and discretion, when his wife put the question directly, What is your name, Blind people do nor need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters, But you wrote books and those books carry your name, said the doctor's wife, Now nobody can read them, it is as if they did not exist.
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.
