Blindness

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The girl with the dark glasses assumes a motherly role for him, as she takes care of him and ensures his safety. Saramago has used quite intelligently one of the characters to infuse intrusive narration through “the doctor’s wife” whose eye balls remain utilitarian throughout the madness of Blind people. He is immediately taken home and then to the doctor's office, where he infects all of the other patients and the doctor. An absorbing tale of murder, intrigue and revenge, this debut historical novel depicts Brazil under Portuguese colonial rule as a hotbed of vice, corruption and misery.

All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. I would suggest that one of the themes evident is how readily civilization/morals/mores/humanity/meaning can deteriorate when something changes (like, for instance, being stranded on a desert island with only your schoolmates or Camus' The Plague).Blindness is the story of an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness afflicting nearly everyone in an unnamed city, and the social breakdown that swiftly follows. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. None of the characters are given names so its the 'doctors wife' or 'girl with dark glasses' as names cease to matter to the blind. Pontiero is known for saying, "Encounters with the animal world are frequent in Lispector’s stories. The man with the gun is the leader of the ward of hoodlums that seizes control of the food supply in the quarantine.

Saramago’s work reminded me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, both are about the crumbling of our civilization as we know it.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. What they succeed at is immediately creating the easy "us versus them" divide between the helpless newly blind and the terrified seeing. She is quiet and caring, leading the blind, washing the raped women, weeping over the dead but killing if she must. The author here has created a society descending into complete ciaos but also has to take into account what would happen if everyone went suddenly blind. They have no time to resolve their conflict, though, since the car thief is the first internee killed by the guards.

Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. Indeed, she is the reader's guide and stand-in, the repository of human decency, the hero, if such an elaborate fable can have a hero. From the sublime, humanistic The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to the intelligent, metaphysical The Cave , Saramoga challenges, warns, argues but also entertains and enlivens through the truth of his transcendent and highly cultured fictions.Before we know, we are immersed in the horrifying surreal world of hopelessness, filth, violence, and hate, where the true enemy is not their affliction but people themselves, which we can see through the eyes of the only person who appears immune to blindness. Desperate needs, inequality of power, shameless gang mentality, helplessness in an exposed situation, loss of control, all these things play a role. By refusing to engage with the complexities of his metaphor where it relates to real blind people, risking sending out messages that are flat out wrong, Saramago is perverting reason, using his power to insult blind people’s human dignity! Only one among them can see, a woman as unnamed as anyone else in the story, but we come to know her as “the doctor's wife. Doctors were baffled, unable to find a cure or slow down the symptoms to allow the human immune system to have a chance.

They never become resentful or jealous of their sighted guide, and she in turn never loses patience with them or falls into despair.This is the beginning of what my son labelled the scariest book he ever read, and yet such a perfectly brilliant masterpiece. The military refuses to allow basic medicine to be delivered, which ensures that a simple infection becomes deadly. We can see, we have the tools for seeing, but we do not use them - not as long as the cars keep moving when the traffic lights turn green. So many women who have had to shoulder up and do the job of both woman and man, both mother and father. There are lots of great themes in the novel, exploring the human condition and how we fail ourselves; and yet, eventually overcome the most severe circumstances.