Blindness

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The powerful writing gives a sense of being one member of the flock, you become one of them, seeing or not seeing every action over there.

He was later promoted to senior lecturer and finally Reader in Latin-American Literature in the Victoria University of Manchester until his retirement in 1995. The major characters of Saramago braved themselves to last extend of their perseverance, which comes out to be most essential of human qualities needed for survival, to remain afloat in this sea of white nothingness. The reader accompanies a group of ten people, the first victims of the scourge that will quarantine, who, in their misfortune, have the unexpected luck of having a woman who can still see among them.

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. It's another contagion, where in a city people getting blind randomly starting from a traffic signal and then spreading through looking into their eyes. Jose Saramago by keeping the wife of the doctor immune to the disease gives himself a conduit to describe events.

When the doctor's wife kills the man with the gun, the blind accountant takes the gun and tries to seize control but he is unable to rally support. The story then follows the doctor's wife, her husband, and their impromptu “family” as they attempt to survive outside, cared for largely by the doctor’s wife, who can still see (though she must hide this fact at first).In a way this book is in two parts, the first part set in the asylum where we mostly follow the people on 'Ward1' which contains the doctor and his wife. From that point in the story, I was so focused on revenge, I became the goddamned Count of Monte Cristo. Moreover, it brings forth the horrifying truth of how the loss of only one sense can almost instantly dismantle our society, our civilization crumbles to nothing. We are so afraid of the idea of having to die, said the doctor's wife, that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn,…….

That, then, leads me to wonder whether Saramago knew that his blind characters, their behaviour and attitudes rang false. Talking about Saramago's writing style, I should say that it may be a bit confusing at first due to the lack of punctuation; there are many long sentences and no quotation marks around dialogues.An early band of affected citizens is sent to a mental ward, in the hopes of containing this sudden epidemic of blindness. And if they did so, then resent those who could see and instead of relying on the few sighted people for help despise them for the obvious power they have. We only start to see that we do not see when we turn blind and there is a disruption in our unseeing complacency.

There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but if there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness. 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! The novel concerns ‘the white evil’ a highly contagious pandemic that causes people to go blind and see nothing but whiteness. Narrative viewpoints switch back and forth in what feels like quite an arbitrary manner with consequences at different times confusing and terrifying.Her utter lack of action and sense of responsibility for the majority of the book almost made me quit reading. Depending upon a stranger's kindness to be able to go home in safety, we witness what appears to be the first sign of corruption and the first crack in society's impending breakdown when the infamous volunteer steals the blind man's car. He is brought to the quarantine without his mother and soon falls in with the group in the first ward.