NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
Jose Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. Although several of his books were available in English translation, not many people in the United States had read his novels prior to the award. Saramago is one of the great masters of storytelling and fiction of our time. His language is unimpeachable and he plays with it often, calling attention to it, even interrupting the story to reflect on words and modes of expressing thoughts. Blindness is a powerful and disquieting allegory illustrating what might happen if society loses sight of what is in fact meaningful. In this novel, humanity is in peril of vanishing both literally and figuratively.
In the nightmarish portrayal of an entire country mysteriously blinded, images of rotting corpses, spreading putrescence, and repulsive acts of behavior mirror the decomposition of human nature. Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. The story begins when the first blind man loses his vision in his car while waiting for a traffic light to change. The man who helps him get safely home goes back and steals his car. The next day the wife of the first blind man takes him to see the eye doctor. Within a few days, the wife of the first blind man, the car thief, the doctor and all of the patients in his waiting room also go blind.
The only character in the novel that miraculously avoids the affliction of blindness is the doctor's wife. The story itself is captivating and in the later sections when the group of 7 is wandering in this nightmare of a city where all are blind is one of the most frightful and even terrifying scenes. This is in no way a horror story, yet it is hard to imagine a novel in the genre of horror rising to the level of terror that Saramago strikes in us in these scenes of wandering bands of blind people struggling to find food and stay alive. It is a gruesome and brilliant painting of pictures for the verbally sighted and yet another addition to the marvelous list of Saramago triumphs. Often, Saramago provides us with stunning imagery, as in this example when the ophthalmologist first discovers he is blind: "He turned to where a mirror was, and this time he did not wonder, What's going on, he did not say, There are a thousand reasons why the human brain should close down, he simply stretched out his hands to touch the glass, he knew that his image was there watching him, his image could see him, he could not see his image. " (p. 31). With a large number of people going blind quickly and with no apparent cause, public health officials panic and the blind are interned in a former mental hospital to protect the population from infection.
They are provided with food but are left to fend for themselves within the walls of the forsaken mental hospital. Soldiers keep watch and threaten to kill anyone who tries to escape. When the health authorities quarantine the blind victims in a guarded mental asylum, Saramago's novel not only becomes an insightful examination of human behavior, but a horrifying study of "a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness" (p. 255). When there is no more water, electricity, or food, only chaos, civilization returns to "the primitive sources of slime" and a "world where all hope is gone" (pp. 209; 277). The numbers of infected persons increases rapidly. New groups of blind people are imprisoned in the hospital.
Among the new inmates are a group of hoodlums, one of whom possesses a gun. The hoodlums soon demand that the other internees pay for their food and provide them with women to fulfill their sexual desires. This outrage soon leads to a revolt. A few days later, the blind internees realize that the entire population of the city has gone blind and they run away from the hospital in search of food. As I mentioned earlier, the doctor's wife is the only character who does not go blind. She remains free from infection.
This allows her to assist the group of blind people. Her eyes allow her to exercise a degree of control over the situation. It is she who kills the blind man with the gun. It is she who leads the blind in their search for food and shelter. After a terrible fire the group can escape and tries to make a living in the free world again, where the whole public life has turned into a catastrophe. As the narrative of Blindness progresses, the conditions of the blind continue to get worse.
They find themselves in a society that no longer functions. Blind people wander around the streets looking for food and shelter. After scavenging for days, they realize that soon it will be impossible to obtain enough sustenance to keep alive. While they are at the edge of despair their vision miraculously begins to return. The novel abruptly ends without making clear in what ways people have been transformed by the horrific experience of collective blindness.
At the end of the novel, the doctors wife who was the only one to see the total collapse of society feels that her privilege of sight over blindness has become the worst of all. The narrator refers to her as the woman "who was born to witness horror." As soon as vision is restored, for the blind the memory of the terrible experience seems to vanish into the air. Apparently the doctors wife is the only one to approach awareness. Her last words seem to confirm it: Do you want me to tell you what I think, Say it, I think we didnt get blind, I think we are blind, Blind who are able to see, Blind that, seeing, cant see. (310). As the epigram to Blindness Saramago uses a quotation from the Book of Exhortations: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe." Near the end of the novel, when the blind people are getting their vision back, he has one of his characters remark: " 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" (292).
These two quotations indicate the political and philosophical intention of the novel. They indicate, but do not disclose it. The greatest problem with an allegorical novel like Blindness is that it grants too much freedom to the reader. It allows too many interpretations. The master sign "blindness" in this novel is a floating signifier.
No matter what his intention, the metaphor of blindness has a real referent. Readers of this novel are faced with an ambiguity, the relationship between the "symbolic" and the "real." Saramago writes as if his metaphorical depiction of misfortune and catastrophe could somehow be innocent of the cultural meanings that are routinely associated with visual impairment. Blindness is obviously a sign of limitation in this novel. It causes the entire society to no longer function.
It also places blind people in the condition of physical threat and psychological torture. The society no longer functions because the blind are not able to provide the ordinary services that we are routinely dependent upon for survival: the production and distribution of food, water and electricity and the maintenance of the infrastructure of transportation and communication. The story of Blindness is compelling, but I think that the real strength in this work has to do with the style in which it is written. The stream-of-consciousness dialogue shows how people actually interact with each other without breaking up the sentences for a visually-oriented audience. In this sense, readers are placed in the same context as the characters in the book. When beginning the book, we must orient ourselves to the running dialogue and nameless characters just as the characters themselves must adjust to being blind and having no faces to identify with.
The author abandons the rigidity of punctuation and refuses to name any of the characters beyond mere description, such as "the girl with the dark glasses." This style does provide the reader with an empathic sense of frustration and associated stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes the narrative seems detached or distant. Sometimes I found it obtrusive, as in the narrator's description of a statement made by the girl with dark glasses: .".. surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are. " I would hold that this is a pretty condescending remark, intimating that a person with little formal education can come up with anything resembling profundity (which by the way, it doesn't anyway). There may be a hint of sexism creeping in here as well. Although skeptical the novel does not represent a denial on the author?
s faith in human power of change. Saramago is totally successful in balancing paradoxes. It might be said that he is epistemologically skeptical since he uses his fiction to knock away at our foundations- but at the same time he is metaphysically faithful. The horrors of the novel are described very vividly and sometimes make you positively sick. But what Saramago shows us is not only the black, egoistic and violent side of people that shows up the moment you remove the thin layer of cultural varnish. He also describes how in very awful situations some people rise above themselves and are capable of altruism and that it is impossible to say who react in what way once something truly awful happens.
A book that definitely makes one think about your life and what would happen if something similar would happen to oneself. Bibliography: Saramago, Jose. Blindness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Saramago Jose. Nobel Lecture, 7 Dec 1998. 12 May 2004 < web > Carreira Shirley.
Female characters in Saramago's works: a study of the symbolism of sight. Comparative Literature Unigranrio - Brazil. 2001. 11 May 2004 < web >
Free research essays on topics related to: blind people, blind man, stream of consciousness, food and shelter, mental hospital
Research essay sample on Food And Shelter Stream Of Consciousness
