BLINDNESS

José de Sousa Saramago

BACKGROUND OF
THE WRITER

José de
Sousa
Saramago 16 November 1922
Azinhaga, Santarém, Portugal
 
18 June 2010 (aged 87)
Tías, Lanzarote, Spain
 NOTABLE WORKS NOTABLE AWARDS

The Gospel According To Jesus Christ

Camões Prize (1995)
Baltasar and Blimunda

Blindness Nobel Prize in Literature

All the Names (1998)

Death with Interruptions

Spouse Pilar del Río
The Double (1988-2010, his death)
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
ABOUT HIS WORKS
His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly
present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the
theopoetic human factor. Saramago is known for a fantastic style of
writing that is mixed with realism. He was overtly political in the themes
of his novels. The books, however, do not read like political or
polemical tracts, far from it, because Saramago gives equal (and
possibly more) weight to human relationships.
 M I L I E U
Since 1975, the party system has been dominated by the social democratic Socialist Party and
the liberal-conservative Social Democratic Party.
·        Thetransition to civilian rule
·        Consolidationof democracy
·        Legacy: The Democratic University

José Saramago came from the poorest of backgrounds – his grandparents, on both sides,
were illiterate agricultural workers, and his father ‘rose’ in the world to become a policeman in
Lisbon, where the family lived in cramped and insalubrious lodgings, and where, given scant
schooling, Saramago virtually taught himself to read. He grew up, too, in the repressive
Portugal of President António de Oliveira Salazar, and saw, at first hand, the effects of that
regime on ordinary working people; under Salazar, the rich, needless to say, continued to
flourish. Those early experiences informed all of Saramago’s writing, his unvarying theme
being the ordinary man or woman pitted against an indifferent or hostile authority.
CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERIZATION

THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

THE DOCTOR
THE FIRST BLIND MAN
THE CAR THIEF
THE GIRL WITH THE DARK GLASSES
THE BOY WITH THE SQUINT
THE OLD MAN WITH THE BLACK EYE PATCH
THE MAN WITH THE GUN
THE BLIND ACCOUNTANT
THE WOMAN WHO SUFFERED FROM INSOMIA
SETTING
The initial setting is an unnamed town in a generic area. The setting also happens to be the abandoned mental
hospital where the blind and infected are sent to be quarantined. The purpose of everything having no name
demonstrates that these areas could be anywhere, connecting the story to you on some level.

CLIMAX
The doctor's wife decides she has had enough. That night, she takes the scissors that she hung on the wall and
creeps to the ward of hoodlums where they are having their orgy. She finds the man with the gun and stabs him
in the neck, slitting his throat and saving the girl that he was in the process of raping. General confusion erupts,
the women try to escape and the blind accountant finds the first man's gun, electing himself leader of the ward.
Once the men realize that another person has the gun they also begin to panic and let the women go. The
doctor's wife tells the blind accountant that every time one of his men leaves the ward he will be stabbed; her
ward will collect the food from now on.

CONFLICT
Person vs. Person – character conflicts whether between heroes and villains or sparring lovers e.g. people fighting
for the ration of food.

Person vs. Supernatural – the source of conflict is supernatural e.g. the man in his car in the middle of an
intersection suddenly struck blind.
PLOT
·        A man in his car in the middle of an intersection suddenly struck blind. A man offered to drive him home.
Eventually, the man stole the blind man's car.

·        The car thief goes blind while trying to escape the from the cops. The first blind man went to an ophthalmologist.

·        The ophthalmologist goes blind the next morning. He, together with his wife, went to the Ministry of
Health to report the spreading epidemic. The doctor’s wife went with him saying
she just got blinded (when she can see clearly).

·        The Ministry of Health put them in a quarantine in an abandoned mental hospital. The doctor and his wife were
started to familiarize the place. The next batch of blind people arrived including the first blind man, the car thief, the
lady with sunglasses and the boy with a squint. They make their way to the bathroom in line when the car thief starts to
grope the lady with sunglasses. She kicked the car thief backwards which earns him an infected leg because of the
heels.

·        The car thief’s leg becomes severe. When the ration of food arrives, the doctor and his wife asked for medical
assistant for the man but they were threatened with a gun if they tried to follow the army and step out of the room.
Later that night, the car thief dragged himself out of the room towards the armies to ask for help about his leg but
gunned down instead.
·        The doctor’s wife asked for ashovel to bury the car thief, pretending to be blind. The next ration arrives
and it was chaotic resulting one of the armies to shoot. Some internees were shot down.

·        The doctor’s wife broke down and was comforted by her husband and the lady with sunglasses. More internees
arrived but there are no vacant beds so all wards were opened just to accommodate everyone. The doctor's wife saw the
old man with black eye patch with a transistor radio and shared the news to everyone.

·        Their government are failing to bring up solutions to the “white sickness”, even people in the positions are going
blind.

·        A group of men in other ward declare themselves to distribute the ration of food in exchange of the people’s
valuables. Everyone got mad but can’t do anything as the leader of the group possess a gun. The doctor’s wife collected
the valuables in their ward, keeping the pair of scissors she have and the old man with black eye patch's radio. The
doctor is sent to take the food in exchange of the collected valuables and learned that the right-hand man of the man
with gun has been blind all his life, thus, he’s the only one who knows how to use braille system of writing
and reading.

·        The radio goes silent – not because it ran out of batteries but because the announcer goes blind, too. The doctor’s
wife decided to roam around and found out that there are only around 20 people on the man with a gun's ward and that
they have a stock of food in their ward.
·        The hoodlums of the third ward demands more goods to be trade in exchange for food but everyone complained that
they do not have anything to trade anymore so they decided that they would accept payment in form of women. If their
ward wants to eat, they should send their women on rotating basis. The women in ward one complied even if it’s against
their will and their husbands'. They were all raped. The women of ward one came back with a dead body of a woman. The
doctor’s wife decided that she’s done pretending and proceeds to clean the corpse and the other women.

·        The doctor’s wife killed the man with gun. The right-hand man found the killed man’s gun and blindly shoots inside
the ward. The doctor’s wife then said that every time one of his men leaves the ward he will be stabbed; her ward will
collect the food from now on. But the ration stops arriving which they thought that was held by the ward three. One
woman set the third ward on fire. Everyone went out of the yard and discovers that the gate isn’t even locked – they are
finally free.

·        The doctor’s wife tries to find something to eat. She found a supermarket and went to its stockroom. When the blind
people smelled food, they started to run after her. She narrowly escaped and got lost. She cried and sat down on ground.
A dog licked her tears off. It started to rain after a few moments and the doctor’s wife watched people washing
themselves and filling their mouths with water. She went home to her group and eat with them.

·        They decided to stay together at the doctor’s and his wife's house which is the nearest from where they are. They
managed to get inside the house after miraculously keeping the key.

·        The first blind man and his wife went back to their home only to find a writer living in their house. They thought
that it is better to stay to the doctor’s house so they went back.
·        The lady in sunglasses returned home only to find the old lady which has the key to her house died and being
picked by the dogs. They decided to give the old lady a decent burial. The house was opened though, letting the old
lady’s rabbits out for them to not die out of starvation. They returned home and had a talk with the old man with eye
patch, admitting their love for each other.

·                The next day when the doctor and his wife search for food in the supermarket's stockroom, they saw many
rotting corpse. Some of them looked like they were tripped getting down on the stockroom. They exited the
supermarket with nothing and proceeds to the church. The doctor’s wife was shocked to see the statues of the saints
and all of the paintings have their eyes covered with white. Someone, before everyone got blinded, had blinded all
the saints. That night, only the little boy ate. When the first blind man is dozing off, he’s disturbed by the fact that he
sees black instead of just white when he’s still awake. He closes and tried to open his eyes to see that he had regained
his sight. Soon enough, they all follow suit and cries can be heard throughout the city of "I can see, I can see."
THEME OR THEMES

The fragility of society Gender relations

Worst and Best in Human Nature Blindness

Social Disintegration Disease

L A P S E S

Absence of Proper Nouns/ Unnamed characters

The dialogue is run into the rest of the prose, with

no punctuation to distinguish it from the rest of the
prose.

Long sentences, at times more than a page long.

Punctuation to Saramago was like traffic signs:

“Too much of it distracted you from the road on
which you traveled.”
Language and Style
The author is Jose Saramago and it was written in Portuguese. ( Ensaio sobre a
Cegueira) translator Giovanni Pontiero he was aided by Margaret Jull Costa in
the task)

Didactic novel

Omniscient narrator. It is written from a complex point of view.

The form and content are interelated, It is dense.

Allegory. Uses methapor.