Blindness (novel)

Did You Know?

• A sequel titled Seeing was published in 2004.
• The novel was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1997.

Plot summary

The novel follows an unexplained mass epidemic of blindness that afflicts nearly everyone in an unnamed city, leading to rapid social breakdown. A handful of unnamed characters, including an ophthalmologist and several of his patients, are among the first stricken. The doctor's wife is inexplicably immune. After a traumatic quarantine in an asylum, the group bands together to survive by their wits and her sight. The government attempts to contain the contagion through increasingly repressive measures. In the asylum, hygiene and morale degrade quickly; food shortages undermine solidarity, and soldiers become hostile. The military refuses to deliver medicine, turning a simple infection deadly. An armed clique gains control of food, subjecting internees to rape and violence. Facing starvation, internees burn down the asylum, only to find the army has abandoned it. The protagonists then join the blind masses wandering the devastated city.

Characters

The doctor's wife is the only character who does not lose her sight, a phenomenon left unexplained. She lies to government doctors to be interned with her husband. Inside the asylum, she tries to organize the compound but cannot prevent its descent into animality. When a ward withholds food and demands women submit to rape, she kills the ward's leader. After escaping, she leads her group, often serving as their nurse. The doctor is an ophthalmologist who goes blind after treating a patient with the white sickness. His authority among the quarantined stems partly from his wife's sight, which she relays to him. The girl with the dark glasses, a former part-time prostitute, is struck blind while with a customer. She joins the group from the doctor's office and kicks the car thief, wounding him fatally. She cares for the boy with the squint and later becomes lovers with the old man with the black eye patch.

Style

Like much of Saramago's work, Blindness uses long passages where commas replace periods, quotation marks, semicolons, and colons. The absence of quotation marks makes speakers' identities and the occurrence of dialogue not immediately clear. Characters lack proper names, being referred to by descriptive appellations such as the doctor's wife or the car thief, some of which seem ironic given their blindness. The city and country are never named, contributing a sense of timelessness and universality. Hints of Portugal appear: the main character eats chouriço, and the original Portuguese uses the familiar tu verb form. The church with saintly images is likely Catholic.

Adaptations

An English-language film adaptation directed by Fernando Meirelles stars Mark Ruffalo as the doctor and Julianne Moore as the doctor's wife; it opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The novel was adapted for theatre in 2007 by the Godlight Theatre Company in New York. An outdoor performance by Polish group Teatr KTO premiered in June 2010 and was performed at the University of Edinburgh during the 2012 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. German composer Anno Schreier received rights from Saramago to compose an opera titled Die Stadt der Blinden, first performed on November 12, 2011 at the Zurich Opera House. In August 2020, the Donmar Warehouse produced a socially-distanced sound installation adapted by Simon Stephens, with Juliet Stevenson voicing the Doctor's Wife.