Humanity’s worst instincts surface and social order disintegrates as individuals are overwhelmed by fear, confusion, and utter helplessness. The breakdown of morality reaches its nadir with the rise of a band of blind men who victimize and humiliate other prisoners through such criminal transgressions as theft, rape, and terror. The scarce and putrid food and the crowding and squalid conditions are exacerbated by the increasingly unruly behavior of the institution’s inmates. In an effort to cope with the epidemic, the authorities imprison the blind in a former mental institution where they must to fend for themselves. Structured around a series of crises involving a mysterious epidemic of blindness, the novel presents as a major theme the demoralizing impact of the affliction and the way in which it leaves chaos and criminality in its wake. The author effectively establishes the realistic consequences of a loss of vision and at the same time suggests the symbolic reverberations of a moral and spiritual condition. This novel eschews conventional punctuation and paragraphs, moves between the first and third person, and shifts tense and perspective it blends narrative, description, and dialogue to create a dreamlike fl ow of voices and episodes that reflect on the idea of blindness in all its permutations. Saramago’s narrative uses the literal blindness of almost all the inhabitants of his city as a political, psychological, and spiritual metaphor.īlindness is written in a distinctive style that Saramago developed when he returned to literature after a 20-year hiatus. A speculative parable reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Plague, Blindness examines the reasons for a mysterious social and moral breakdown in a typical modern city. His novel Blindness is considered one of his most outstanding literary achievements.

José Saramago (1922–2010 ), one of Portugal’s most famous writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988.

Blindness by josé saramago