It is the voice of Blindness that gives it its charm and that makes it possible to read of such horrors. In fact, Saramago makes obvious what we all know to be true: that sight, moral and otherwise, is the basis of civilization. In a city of the blind, everyone is lost. It is a world that is perfectly established by the details that Saramago invokes to suggest lives suddenly gone dark: People can no longer, for instance, find their shoes, or their houses. The city has degenerated into a chaos of the sightless, where life is brutish and short. Ultimately this group of the blind, led by a woman who can still see, is able to escape into the city from which it came. “It is a dark, appalling world, and by the way it is written, in the details that Saramago uses to such good effect, almost all the horrors of the 20th century are addressed: We are continually reminded of concentration camps, of the excesses of capitalism without the least restraint, of the miseries of bureaucratic aloofness, of militarism and, of course, the endless darkness of the human heart. After taking the inmates’ possessions, the thugs extort the services of the camp’s women. The nadir occurs when thugs steal food meant for the inmates and then sell it to them. The life of the camp quickly degenerates into a Hell on Earth where the blind are victimized first by the way they have been rounded up and shoved into what was a mental hospital, then by the fact that they are not fed regularly, and most appallingly by how they are reduced in their attempt to stay alive. In particular, we follow the events that concern the first few cases: a blind taxi driver, a blind thief, an ophthalmologist and a young woman who is identified by the fact that she wears dark glasses. The epidemic spreads through an unnamed city (with certain Portuguese highlights), and soon a quarantine camp is established in which the newly blind are confined. What he says is, ‘Please, will someone take me home?’ This moment is much like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, since the driver who has been struck blind does not moan and scream or complain. For instance, one of the first is a man driving his car who loses his sight while waiting at a traffic signal. A distinguishing aspect of the epidemic is the speed of its onset in individual cases. Surely, Saramago is in a league that requires comparison with such writers, on the basis not only of skill but subject matter, too.īlindness is the account of an epidemic in which people lose their sight. In fact, it is fitting that Camus and Kafka come to mind in considering this book, if only as a kind of speed rating.
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