Blindness José Saramago : A Detailed Summary - 1

 

 

Introduction

Jose Saramago has been a bestselling author in Portugal for many years. Some of his works have been translated into other  languages as well. He was a well-known atheist and communist. He is remarkable for allegorical writing. He published several critically acclaimed novels before 1991 when his highly controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was banned as blasphemous in a number of countries. Yet, in 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Blindness, an allegorical novel. The Portuguese edition, Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Essay on Blindness), was published in 1995 and translated into English in 1997. Blindness raises questions about the frailty of social structures and the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. The central question raised in the novel is what would happen if everyone suddenly went blind? To imagine an answer to this question, Saramago writes a story about an

epidemic that creates chaos in the capital city of an unknown country in the late twentieth century. It is a worst case scenario of government and social failure in which the best and worst in humankind is portrayed. This tale has no specific setting, no names for the characters, and no chapter titles. It is written in Saramago’s unique style that uses little punctuation, long sentences that can continue for a paragraph, and paragraphs that can run for pages.

 

 

Chapter 1

While waiting at a stop light, a man suddenly becomes blind with a white blindness. A stranger drives him home, but the blind man rejects the stranger’s offer to stay with him until his wife comes home because the blind man fears having a stranger in his house. When his wife arrives, she calls an ophthalmologist, and they are able to get in for an examination right away, but they discover that the stranger has stolen their car. The doctor is unable to find out the cause of the blindness.

 

Chapter 2

The stranger who stole the car too, goes blind. Meanwhile, the ophthalmologist studies about  the mysterious case of sudden white blindness and plans his course of research on the subject. That evening, however, he goes blind as well. At the same time, one of his patients from the afternoon, a prostitute who leaves wearing sunglasses to ease her mild conjunctivitis (eye infection, becomes red), goes to meet a client and soon thereafter goes blind.

 

Chapter 3

A policeman takes the car thief to home, and another policeman removes the panicked girl in the dark glasses from her hotel and takes her home to her parents. The doctor spends the night thinking about his situation. He finally tells his wife the next morning and then realizes that if the blindness is contagious, he could infect her, but she remains calm and unaffected. When the doctor tries to talk to an official at the Ministry of Health about a possible contagion, the doctor runs into bureaucratic roadblocks, so he calls the director of his hospital who wants to be cautious to avoid panic situation. As the day goes by, however, and more cases are reported, the ministry calls the doctor to find out if all the cases are his patients then tells him that he needs to be quarantined. When he gets in the ambulance, his wife gets in with him declaring that she, too, has gone blind.

 

Chapter 4

The Commission on Logistics and Security, after debating several options, decides to use an empty mental hospital to quarantine the newly blind on one wing and those infected in another. By the end of the second day, all the blind have been rounded up and placed under armed guard at the asylum. The doctor and his wife arrive first. She is not really blind, so she inspects the facility. Then the first blind man, the one who stole his car, the girl with the dark glasses, and

the boy with a squint who had also been the doctor’s patient all arrive. The boy keeps crying for his mother. They all make an attempt to get acquainted. Then the loudspeaker announces the rules of their quarantine and the process for receiving food rations. The six inmates decide to organize with the doctor as their leader. One man starts to blame the doctor for being their link to blindness, and the first blind man realizes he is with the man who stole his car. They scuffle but are separated. The doctor’s wife leads the group to the lavatories. The thief tries to molest the girl, so she kicks him with a stiletto heel. The doctor and his wife have to try to bandage the wound. Upon returning, they count the beds to learn their places.

 

Chapter 5

The next morning, the thief has a bad fever from the wound. More people arrive, and when introductions are made, the first blind man discovers his wife, and other connections are made. The girl with dark glasses asks the thief for forgiveness, and he apologizes, too. When the doctor and his wife go to get the group’s food, they try to ask for assistance for the wounded man but are brutally rejected. They are receiving rations for only five when there are ten, then three more arrive from the infected ward. Shortly thereafter, a crowd of blind people arrives from the city, the ward is filled, and some go to the other empty ward. The doctor realizes how difficult sanitation will be. The thief tells the doctor’s wife that he knows she can see. That night, he crawls out of the ward, hoping to convince the guard to send him to a hospital; instead, he is shot, and the others are told to come drag away the body.

 

Chapter 6

The doctor and his wife have to negotiate with the guards for a spade. Digging the grave is very difficult, and no breakfast rations come. When the soldiers finally deliver some food, they are so startled by the inmates who had come to the front and the soldiers openly fire them, a number of people shot dead at the moment. Later, the dead bodies were moved to the yard, and carry away the containers. The doctor discovers that there is no more toilet paper in the lavatories. His wife helps to clean him, then she too worries about the sanitation problems and when she will go blind. Most of the time at night, some couple have sex, and the sounds disgust those who are awake.

 

Chapter 7

The doctor’s wife’s watch stops and the further disorientation of the loss of time causes her to sob uncontrollably. The girl in the dark glasses consoles her. While waiting for the food to arrive, some people from the two wards talk to each other impatiently. The guards are so afraid of contagion that they make the inmates come out into the yard to get their food, and the people have to crawl around to find where it is placed. One man becomes so lost that he has to be guided back by the shouts of the group. Taking advantage of this distraction, someone steals some of the food containers. After this incident, the wards decide to set up a committee to oversee distributing the food equally. However, a large group of people arrives, and there is panic pushing and striking as they try to find their way into the building. A man with a black patch waits outside until the chaos subsides then finds his way to the first ward where fate provides him the last remaining bed there.