Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago asks a simple question: What would happen if everyone went blind? This is the subject of Saramago's novel Blindness.
Like Franz Kafka, Saramago has a tendency to place ordinary people in unimaginable situations, to see whether they can make their way back out. In Blindness, he creates a mysterious condition that gradually blinds almost every inhabitant of an unnamed city. What ensues is a nightmare of mistrust, violence, and political incompetence that forces the protagonists to create a new kind of order.
1. From Normalcy to Chaos
As the novel opens, an unexplained epidemic begins to sweep the city, leaving people sightless. People are going blind, and nobody knows why. One of the main characters of the novel, a doctor who has just diagnosed the blindness in one of his patients, becomes a victim; his wife, for reasons unknown, will be the only one not to suffer from this ailment.
An important aspect of the characters in Blindness is that they remain nameless, identified only by their professions: the doctor, the doctor's wife, and so on. This instills in the reader a sense of disorientation not unlike the one the sightless characters experience. It also broadens the scope of the novel: nameless people, in an unnamed town, in an unidentified country. What happens here next, Saramago seems to say, could take place anywhere.
2. Justice Dethroned
Soon after the blindness spreads, the government realizes it has a problem it needs to address immediately. Is the blindness contagious? There is no effort to find out; the authorities simply take over an old mental asylum, where they begin to forcibly transport the afflicted. The doctor's wife, fearing for her spouse, fakes blindness in order to accompany him.
Inside the asylum, the blind inmates are treated like criminals. Out of irrational fear, the authorities have posted armed guards who will shoot anyone who approaches them. Food and other basic necessities are delivered with increasingly less frequency, and the conditions deteriorate. In time, all authority disappears, as the entire town falls prey to the blindness.
3. A Lawless World
The lack of government represents a turning point in the novel, as the asylum's inmates are confronted with the need to organize for their own survival. However, there are contrasting interpretations of survival: for some, it means solidarity, while for others it means taking as much as they can for themselves. All the inmates are blind (except for the doctor's wife), but some are less helpless than others. Thus, the asylum is divided into aggressors and victims, and becomes a macabre experiment in how to build a society form scratch. There is no social class, no economic influence, and no other way of judging one's fellow humans save for their professional/life skills and their determination to survive. By the time the asylum burns to the ground, we are asking ourselves whether humans are innately good or evil, and whether we'd be able to start over if our known universe and its rules suddenly disappeared.
The rest of the novel takes place in the streets and abandoned homes of the city, where the sightless characters try to secure their basic needs. The old laws of property no longer apply: whoever manages to find a house keeps it, until they lose their way during one of their trips out for food. Stores are vandalized, and people perform their bodily functions in the middle of the street; after all, who can see? The doctor's wife, the novel's only witness, is appalled by the disintegrating norms of society, but dares not reveal that she can see.
In the end, everyone's sight comes back as mysteriously as it had disappeared, and social order is restored. But how can these people now face one another, after the betrayals and violence? The novel ends here, unfortunately, but we can imagine the long road ahead for these survivors. And we ask ourselves whether our tendency towards humane behavior is truly so fragile.
