I honestly don’t know how to define my experience with this book. Some had told me that the novel was a fast read, others that it became dense and tedious, some even said that it left a bad feeling in the body. “Blindness” is certainly not a novel to " devour", it's just so hard, so deep, and so powerfully wise that it should be read calmly. For reasons of time, I could not read many pages a day. However, I am very happy to have reached the end of this great novel.
The story starts as a man suddenly goes blind. Unaware that he is triggering an epidemic of global blindness, the poor man shouts for help and draws the attention of the people around him. The disease spreads and begins to bring out the basest instincts of human beings. In the story we follow the "adventures" of a very special character that is apparently immune to this peculiar blindness: the wife of the doctor. Even though she is not sick, the wife of the doctor follows his husband to the concentration camp where the government, under the pretext of "national security", has locked the infected. The blind, treated as real animals, try to survive in this hostile environment that slowly dehumanizes them.
The story delves in the soul of the human, who face an extreme situation that arouses a basic instinct: that of survival. One of the many reflections of Saramago in the story refers to the human behavior when there is no clear authority to guide and govern. As Saramago (the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature) explains in his book, when the only objective is to survive it is easier to overlook the fact that humans depend of each other. Therefore, personal needs rise above society’s welfare. In the group of the blind, some try to maintain justice, but others behave as expected by their physical limitations. Victims of an intolerable impotence filth, misery, violence, and sexual degradation precede their human dignity. Nevertheless, the sense we grasp after the reflections of Saramago is truly distinctive since it is both kind and harsh. We recognize a witness of the series of events in the story whose heart breaks for the misery he sees around him; he feels the most exalted of human emotions, love, for those who suffer, and yet, in moments of exasperation, he cannot resist the stupidity, crassness, and greed of the human race.
All in all, the reader will feel that the blindness is merely " a blindness symbolizing a blindness " since the book explains that we are not able to recognize our limitations, nor who we are or what we want to be. The miseries of mankind are invisible to man. They are only visible to those with a more universal conception, such as the doctor’s wife. I believe that the last paragraph of the book summarizes the entire idea of the novel (it doesn’t reveal anything of the plot, by the way):
“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.”
Here are a couple of quotes more…
“You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.”
“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”
“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
The story starts as a man suddenly goes blind. Unaware that he is triggering an epidemic of global blindness, the poor man shouts for help and draws the attention of the people around him. The disease spreads and begins to bring out the basest instincts of human beings. In the story we follow the "adventures" of a very special character that is apparently immune to this peculiar blindness: the wife of the doctor. Even though she is not sick, the wife of the doctor follows his husband to the concentration camp where the government, under the pretext of "national security", has locked the infected. The blind, treated as real animals, try to survive in this hostile environment that slowly dehumanizes them.
The story delves in the soul of the human, who face an extreme situation that arouses a basic instinct: that of survival. One of the many reflections of Saramago in the story refers to the human behavior when there is no clear authority to guide and govern. As Saramago (the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature) explains in his book, when the only objective is to survive it is easier to overlook the fact that humans depend of each other. Therefore, personal needs rise above society’s welfare. In the group of the blind, some try to maintain justice, but others behave as expected by their physical limitations. Victims of an intolerable impotence filth, misery, violence, and sexual degradation precede their human dignity. Nevertheless, the sense we grasp after the reflections of Saramago is truly distinctive since it is both kind and harsh. We recognize a witness of the series of events in the story whose heart breaks for the misery he sees around him; he feels the most exalted of human emotions, love, for those who suffer, and yet, in moments of exasperation, he cannot resist the stupidity, crassness, and greed of the human race.
All in all, the reader will feel that the blindness is merely " a blindness symbolizing a blindness " since the book explains that we are not able to recognize our limitations, nor who we are or what we want to be. The miseries of mankind are invisible to man. They are only visible to those with a more universal conception, such as the doctor’s wife. I believe that the last paragraph of the book summarizes the entire idea of the novel (it doesn’t reveal anything of the plot, by the way):
“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.”
Here are a couple of quotes more…
“You never know beforehand what people are capable of, you have to wait, give it time, it's time that rules, time is our gambling partner on the other side of the table and it holds all the cards of the deck in its hand, we have to guess the winning cards of life, our lives.”
“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”
“Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”