Blindness

As the situation within the asylum becomes more precarious, one of the central questions that arises surrounds the idea of what it means to be blind. In true postmodern fashion, Saramago offers competing ideas about the meaning of sightlessness in the novel, many of which are on display in this section.

On the one hand, Saramago suggests that physical blindness allows people to better see the truth around them, in other people, and in themselves. This is perhaps most evident in the character of the thief. When he first enters the ward, he is belligerent and suspicious. He initially refuses to introduce himself to his other ward mates, and when he does, he gets in an altercation with the first blind man over the latter’s stolen car. He threatens the doctor who tries to calm the situation, telling him to “watch your step when you’re dealing with me” (48). His simmering anger turns into sexual assault just a few minutes later when he gropes the girl with the dark glasses. He receives what turns out to be a fatal wound for his trouble.

As his story unfolds, his character evolves. For instance, when the girl realizes that she has inflicted a terrible wound, she goes to the thief’s bedside and apologizes for her reaction. Instead of responding in anger as he did earlier, he tells her “these things happen in life, I shouldn’t have done what I did either” (62). Likewise, when he tells the doctor’s wife that he knows she can see, he does not leverage the situation to his own advantage as he did when he stole the first blind man’s car. Instead of using her secret as collateral for medicine or extra help, he simply reassures her and says, “[D]on’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to anyone” (70).

The thief’s blindness has been personally transformative, which becomes incredibly clear as he drags himself to the gates to ask the soldiers for medicine. On the way there, he has a crisis of conscience. He now understands how helpless he has become without his sight, which in turn makes him realize how terrible his theft truly was: “A blind man is sacred,” his conscience tells him, “you don’t steal from a blind man” (73). The experience of blindness has fundamentally changed the thief as a person, making him more compassionate. It also gives him a better understanding of his true self, which has long been hidden beneath his immoral actions. As he pulls himself along, he starts to see himself as more than just a pair of sticky fingers. He recognizes he is smart and “logical,” which leads him to see “himself in a different light […] and were it not for this damn leg he would swear he had never felt so well in his entire life” (75). In losing his literal sight, the thief can “make [his] eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards” (17), as the second narrator points out in Chapter 2. His vision may be white, but he can suddenly see both the impact of his actions and how they have masked the truth of his character.

The same is true for the girl with the glasses. When readers first meet her, the second narrator introduces her as a hedonist who “takes advantage of any free time to indulge her body and satisfy needs, both individual and general” (23). Although the narrator cautions readers not to reduce her to her profession, by labeling her a prostitute, the narrator effectively does just that. However, the girl also believes she is being “punished because of her disreputable conduct, for her immorality” (27), and that her blindness is comeuppance for her behavior. Once people can no longer see her beauty or her actions, the girl can remake herself free of others’ assumptions. Readers see this when she unexpectedly takes the boy with the squint under her wing. She comforts him as he asks after his mother, and even as food becomes scarce, she continues to give him most of her own rations. While she is not the boy’s biological mother, nor does she have children of her own, she assumes the mantle of motherhood as she guides the boy through the apocalypse. Like the thief, once the girl with the glasses is stripped of her literal sight, she also becomes free of the identity others have read upon her. Once again, sightlessness allows characters to see themselves more clearly.

However, these instances of the positive power of blindness seem to be exceptions to the rule for Saramago. Blindness seems to work differently for the thief and the girl with the glasses largely because of their connection to the doctor’s wife and the community she brings together. For the rest of the internees, blindness has an almost opposite effect. As people lose their sight, they also lose their humanity. They are treated like livestock, thrown into an asylum that is barely fit for occupation. As the doctor’s wife observes, they are treated like “dogs,” and later, the narrator observes that the blind move around like insects, waving their arms around like “antennae” (57, 81). This language not only dehumanizes the blind, it also suggests that Saramago sees sight as a critical part of the human experience. If blindness is not bolstered by community and kindness—as is the case with those in the first ward—people will devolve to their most atavistic instincts. Not only do they harm others to provide for themselves, they lose interest in those around them, so much so that as long as they live, the blind do not care about “knowing those who had died” (87).

While the blind are consistently characterized as animals, blindness also dehumanizes those who retain their sight. Driven partly by exceptionalism but mostly by fear, the soldiers charged with containing the infected mistreat the internees. For instance, when the doctor asks for medicine to treat the thief, the soldiers deny him any assistance. The soldiers threaten to shoot the doctor and his wife, and one turns to the rest of the group and says he would kill them “even if it were my own brother” (63). For his part, the doctor cannot believe the soldiers would deny them basic medical supplies and laments, “[I]t’s against all the rules of humanity” (63). The act of treating the infected as subhuman has the equal consequence of dehumanizing the sighted as well. This culminates—in this section, at least—with the massacre of the blind by a frightened group of soldiers. The blind are starving, so when they hear the soldiers and aid workers approach, they begin creeping out into the hallway. They get too close, and the soldiers open fire on the group and kill four people. The military later insists they “are not to blame,” and that its soldiers acted in “legitimate defense” (83). With each instance of aggression, heartlessness, and cruelty, the soldiers lose more of themselves, too. When life revolves around the survival of the fittest rather than human compassion, Saramago asks how anyone could expect otherwise.