Parallels with our own time? But of course, as in this line, too, when enough government officials still had their sight to offer the following: Terrifyingly, the blindness descends on everyone (save the doctor’s wife, wherein lies its own tale) with great suddenness, most always in the presence of an already blind person, leading authorities to deduce it is highly contagious.ĭrastic measures are thus called for to try to limit its spread, including an immediate quarantine of all those already blinded and those with whom the blind have interacted. The clear implication: these people in this country represent the entire, becoming-blind world. Notable, too, is that all the characters remain unnamed, Saramago using descriptors for them throughout -“the doctor,” “the doctor’s wife,” “the girl with dark glasses.” So begins “Blindness,” the late Portuguese writer José Saramago’s powerful, wholly original 1995 novel that explores a dystopian world in which blindness descends first on the driver depicted above but in short order engulfs all but one other inhabitant of an unnamed country at an unspecified, though modern time in human history.Īt base, the hearty band of seven people we follow through to the story’s conclusion stand as a towering-if humbled to the nth degree-testament to human solidarity and perseverance. Then they open his door to hear him exclaim, “I am blind.” There, they behold a man waving his arms and turning his head side to side. Horns honk, epithets are muttered, drivers waiting behind the stationary car finally get out to investigate, then pound on the driver’s side window. Cars line up at a traffic signal while their drivers wait for the light to turn green.

José saramago blindness