Blindness

The doctor, an ophthalmologist, is one of the seven main characters of the novel. The first blind man visits him for treatment before anyone knows it’s an epidemic. When the doctor examines the blind man’s eyes, nothing seems out of place, and there’s no known reason he should be blind. The night after the blind man’s visit, the doctor goes home to research the man’s condition but falls blind shortly after. The doctor sets the rest of the plot in motion because he immediately realizes the blindness is contagious. When he calls the government to sound the alarm, he is dismissed until he contacts a colleague at the hospital, who is also seeing similar patients. Only then is the doctor taken seriously. The doctor’s characterization as an independently qualified analytical expert who is logical, levelheaded, thoughtful, and optimistic, lends credence to the novel’s major conflict (contagious blindness), and offers readers answers to their more practical questions. As the plot advances, the doctor loses more status due to his blindness, ultimately culminating in a significant shift in the power dynamic between the doctor and his wife. This power shift is symbolic of the larger thematic conversation happening in the novel around society at large. He loses status at the same time that the social structures around him collapse. By transferring power to his wife, Saramago suggests a patriarchal social framework is unviable, and society can only be saved by a new paradigm of social values transferred from the patriarchy.

The doctor’s wife is the novel’s main protagonist. When the government comes to take her husband to quarantine, she fakes blindness in order to accompany her husband and offer him protection. Her characterization as a brave, confident, woman in control of her environment makes her perfectly positioned to assume a leadership role near the end of the novel. She designates herself the caretaker for the first ward and advocates for the newly blind patients being held captive in quarantine. Her caretaker role ultimately solidifies when she sneaks into the blind hoodlums’ quarters and kills their leader by stabbing him in the neck with a pair of scissors. The longer she occupies her place in the quarantine, the more comfortable she grows with her authority, and the more guilty she feels about ultimately being unable to meet the needs of all the internees. By the time the asylum quarantine burns down, she fully inhabits her role as leader and helps her newly formed family navigate the hellish landscape around them. She holds two other important positions in the novel—witness and savior. As a witness, the doctor’s wife becomes a sighted proxy for the internees. She sees all the things the blind can only imagine. She translates the horrors happening around them, but in doing so, she sanitizes the descriptions of what’s happening to protect those who cannot see. When her group stumbles upon a fresh human corpse being devoured by dogs, she is so horrified and distraught by what she sees, she begins vomiting. When the group hears her vomit and asks why, she lies and tells them she’s only vomiting due to bad food. Saramago implies sight is such a critical element of the human condition that only sighted people in control of all their faculties are fully human. This implication positions the doctor’s wife in such a way that she serves as the only “fully human” advocate for the lesser internees. She chooses to carry the burden of what she sees by herself in order to protect those around her. This burden is not without cost; the doctor’s wife often wishes for blindness in order to free herself from her role as a witness. This sacrificial burden sets up her third role in the novel, a savior. Her role as sacrificial savior is allegorical—she is the Christ-like figure of the novel—washing and cleansing the bodies of the women in the first ward who were savagely raped by their captors. Her sacrifice for the good of her community becomes Saramago’s rubric for how society should operate.

This is a distinction given to a group of people who have been exposed to the white sickness. Once someone becomes contaminated, they are forced into a quarantine area with the rest of the contaminated. When any one of the contaminated goes blind, the rest of the ward kicks them out where they are forced to stumble around the asylum until they find their way to one of the blind wards or survive on their own. The contaminated are ultimately victimized by the government’s choice to sacrifice these individuals to protect its power and status quo as opposed to managing the outbreak and preserving the contaminated’s civil and human rights. This shortsightedness from the government is counterproductive and ultimately exacerbates social collapse.

This is a distinction given to the contaminated who go blind from the white sickness. This blindness is unlike any known disease. With no symptoms other than blindness, there’s no physical indicator of sickness, no test for infection or exposure, and no cure. It’s also unlike any known blindness as the infected experience blindness as a “whiteout” versus a “blackout.” The government subjects the infected to inhumane treatment, which reveals how dysfunctional society has become at every level. As the epidemic spreads, the infected overwhelm the government-controlled quarantines, and the infection spreads until everyone but the doctor’s wife goes blind.

The first blind man, patient zero, stumbles into the doctor’s office seeking treatment for his mysterious blindness. He initially goes blind while driving and must rely on the kindness of a Good Samaritan to guide him home. He spreads the infection to everyone he makes contact with, including his wife, the doctor, and all the patients in the doctor’s office. He maintains a relationship with the doctor and the doctor’s wife throughout the novel. Months after going blind, he becomes the first person to regain his sight once the disease runs its course. Although he’s accused by other characters of ruining their lives, the first blind man never expresses any remorse for infecting others or initiating complete global social collapse. Through the first blind man, Saramago can accentuate how difficult living without sight can be, which increases tension as the rest of the world goes blind.

The first blind man’s wife goes blind while crying about her husband’s internment. They enjoy a tearful reunion when she is interned in the same ward as her husband. Like the doctor’s wife, the first blind man’s wife gains power as the novel progresses. This assumption of power culminates when the hoodlums call for women. Her husband tries to forbid her going, but she pushes back and makes her own decision to sacrifice herself for the good of others.

The Good Samaritan who brings the first blind man home after he goes blind decides to steal the blind man’s car. While the car thief didn’t initially plan on stealing the first blind man’s car, he is an opportunist and decided to take it when he had the chance. After realizing the blindness is contagious, he has second thoughts about his decision. He quickly decides to abandon the stolen car, but it’s too late. He goes blind shortly after abandoning their car. He inevitably ends up in the first ward with everyone else. A fight breaks out between the car thief and the first blind man when the first blind man realizes who stole his car. The fight is broken up by the doctor’s wife. The plot arc of the car thief demonstrates how physical blindness can reveal the inner truth of a person. When the car thief first gets to the ward, he is belligerent, threatening, and even gropes the girl with the glasses. When the girl with the glasses defends herself by kicking the car thief, the heel of her shoe punctures his thigh. The wound gets infected, and within days his condition worsens. Near death, the car thief begins to change. He begins forgiving others and doing the right thing. His transformation becomes most apparent when he attempts to get treatment for himself. In his moment of crisis, crawling to the asylum gates to ask for medicine, he recants of his past behavior and realizes he’s more than the sum of his transgressions. However, it’s too little too late. The guards see him approaching and gun him down. The rest of the ward honors him by burying him in a shallow grave. For Saramago, the car thief’s redemptive arc shows that by losing his sight, the car thief gains better insight into himself.

The girl with the glasses is infected with the white sickness by the first blind man at the doctor’s office. She goes blind while prostituting and is convinced it’s punishment for her indiscretions. Like the car thief, her character’s redemptive arc benefits from the blindness. While the rest of the ward identifies themselves based on their professions, the girl with the glasses dons the mantle of motherhood instead of prostitute by adopting the boy with the squint who joins them in the ward. She comforts him, helps him navigate the ward, and gives him her rations so he has plenty to eat. The girl with the glasses offers yet more evidence that Saramago believes sacrifice is intrinsic to womanhood. She is the third of many female characters who sacrifice themselves in service to the greater good. Conversely, the men in the novel are unwilling or unable to offer similar sacrifices. Later in the novel, the girl with the glasses initiates an intimate relationship with the old man with the eyepatch and continues that relationship once both parties regain their sight. This decision shows readers the transformation brought by kindness and compassion is a permanent change that allows the characters to transcend the apocalypse.

The boy is separated from his mother at the hospital when he goes blind. He’s the patient that convinces the hospital staff that the white sickness is an epidemic, and that they should take the doctor’s warnings seriously. When the boy first arrives at the ward, he desperately wants to reunite with his mother, but because that isn’t possible, the girl with the glasses steps in to fill that void. As the novel progresses, the boy attaches to the girl as his new mother. Saramago’s descriptions of the cruelty forced upon the boy emphasize the horrific methods the government uses to manage the white sickness epidemic.

These two characters are part of the second wave of internees into the first ward. Introduced by profession and not by name, the taxi-driver and the two policeman all had contact with the first wave of infected—the first blind man, the girl with the glasses, and the car thief. As more infected arrive at the asylum, food becomes scarcer due to the government’s indifference to maintaining an accurate count of internees and slowly offering less and less sufficient rations. As the infected in the wards slowly starve, they grow more aggressive in their attempts to secure sufficient rations. When government soldiers arrive to deliver rations, a group of infected, including the taxi driver and two policemen, inadvertently startle the soldiers who promptly open fire and gun down these three characters. Members of the first ward, led by the doctor’s wife, come to recover their bodies and secure them for burial. The other victims from the other wards are not recovered and are left to rot in the open. Saramago uses these characters to emphasize how dehumanized the infected have become to the government—treated not like people, but othered beyond recognition.

The blind man with the black eyepatch is the last core character to enter the asylum. He enters amid chaos as part of a major influx of infected that fills the asylum beyond capacity. He waits in the courtyard until the stampede of new internees settles down, and he eventually finds the open bed left by the car thief in the first ward. This is particularly fortuitous as he also contracted the sickness in the doctor’s office with the other main characters in the ward, but he didn’t become symptomatic until much later. The blind man with the eye patch is a wise old man who has been on the outside longer than any other character. He paints a picture of society continuing to spiral into chaos. He smuggles in a small battery-powered transistor radio that allows the ward connection to what’s happening on the outside. Throughout the novel, he brokers in knowledge and contributes sound strategies that allow members of the first ward to reclaim their autonomy as the asylum breaks down and ultimately catches fire. Later in the novel, he enters into an intimate relationship with the girl with the glasses. He is the only character that never regains his sight after the white sickness runs its course. His significance stems from his contributions to the core “family” of characters that occupy the first ward.

Sometimes called “the blind thugs” (186), this is the group of 20 or so male internees who occupy the third ward. They enter the asylum with the last group of internees and immediately begin to exploit the asylum’s power vacuum. By seizing the rations, they also seize tyrannical power. They force all the internees to turn over their valuables which they plan to use as part of their escape and/or cure. They reserve the best food for themselves and distribute spoiled and inferior rations to the rest of the asylum. Even though they are greatly outnumbered, the rest of the asylum can’t muster the collective will to overpower the hoodlums and free themselves from their tyranny. Things only get worse when the blind hoodlums turn over their women to be used as sex slaves to be raped in exchange for food for their wards. After a brief impasse, the women in the ward volunteer to be raped and sacrifice their bodies in exchange for food. These rapes are so horrific and violent that one of the women from the first ward dies. After the woman dies, the doctor’s wife avenges all the women by sneaking into the hoodlum lair and stabbing their leader in the neck, killing him with a pair of scissors, and rescuing the remaining women being held captive. The blind accountant takes over after the leader dies but can’t consolidate power within the group. Ultimately, all the hoodlums die in the asylum fire near the end of the novel. Saramago uses the hoodlums to illustrate how easy it is for tyranny to rise within any social power vacuum, and how difficult it is to overthrow terrible amounts of tyranny due to an incapacity to compromise interests into a cohesive collective will.

The blind accountant assumes power over the blind hoodlums after their leader dies. The doctor realizes when the blind accountant is asked to take notes for the hoodlums in a gathering that the blind accountant can’t see, but rather was already a blind person who has had his whole life to adapt to life without sight. This gives the blind hoodlums a leg up, as they have a well-adapted member of their ranks. 

The emaciated old woman is the only person still living in the girl with the glasses’ apartment complex. After escaping the asylum, the first ward group decides to visit the homes of all its members. The emaciated woman is found in the apartment building; she has been living off her vegetable garden and raw meat from her rabbits and chickens. She’s filthy, malnourished, and deeply suspicious. While she does return the keys to the girl with the glasses, she’s wary and distrusting of the rest of the newcomers. Despite her reticence, the first ward group treats her compassionately and with dignity in the face of savagery. This compassion changes her heart and offers the old woman a transcendent path. The old woman realizes near the end of the novel that she is dying, and in her death, she chooses to die outside her apartment holding the keys to the girl with the glasses’ apartment so the first ward group can have a way to reenter the flat. Her actions reinforce Saramago’s themes of sacrifice and the transformative power of compassion.