ENSAIO SOBRE A CEGUEIRA / BLINDNESS

BY: JOSÉ SARAMAGO

Kawã Henrique Fabrício Siqueira
Letícia Menezes Martins
PLOT SUMMARY
This story begins with a driver standing at a traffic light, who is the first
that goes blind. From this, an epidemic of blindness (apparently
contagious) occurs throughout the city, what turns the place into chaos,
with isolated people left alone.
Faced with the epidemic, the government decides to quarantine, in a
building that was a former asylum, all the people who were blind. When
the characters in the book come together, human evils are presented to the
reader in a terrible way. For example, the first man who went blind was
stolen, and the robber turned out to be a rapist with a woman that was blind
too.
Avoiding complete disorder, the First Blind, The First Blind Woman, The
Doctor, The Doctor's Woman, The Old Man, and the Girl (the author does
not name the characters) come together to try to maintain organization and
survive in an environment, where people were becoming irrational, but the
organization doesn’t succeed.
In that place, where everybody was blind, the hope was over, and the
structures of a civilized society did not seem to exist. With each passing
day, more people are being placed in this environment, causing greater and
greater chaos, where animal survival instincts prevailed.