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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Blindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Existence, Uncertainty, and Autonomy
Good, Evil, and Moral Conscience
Biological Needs and Human Society
Narrative, Ideology, and Identity
Summary
Analysis
A traffic light turns red, and drivers impatiently wait for pedestrians to cross. When the light turns green, one car fails to advance. While the narrator muses that it is probably for some mechanical reason, the other drivers start “beat[ing] furiously on the [car’s] closed windows.” The man driving the car begins shouting repeatedly, “I am blind.” Although the blind man’s “eyes seem healthy,” his face shows “that he is distraught with anguish.” Bystanders argue about what to do, but the blind man just wants to go home, and another man offers to drive him home in his car. The bystanders help the blind man get out of his car and into the other man’s passenger seat. The blind man remarks that he only sees white, and he thanks the man who has offered to drive him. The other man simply remarks that nobody “know[s] what might lie in store for” them. The light is red again, so they are forced to wait it out.
The way in which the other drivers react to the man’s crisis of sudden blindness exemplifies how luxury and modern technology, such as cars, now dominate and completely structure human life and society. Rather than empathizing with and helping the man, the other drivers are angry at the minor inconvenience of being held up at the light, suggesting that they value convenience and efficiency over fellow human beings. The driver’s terror at going blind reflects the fact that there will always be things about the world that we can neither explain nor understand—no matter how developed human society becomes—and the narrator echoes this fundamental ignorance by initially withholding the explanation for the car’s sudden lack of movement from the reader. In the same vein, the driver who helps out the blind man comments about people’s fundamental uncertainty about the future—human beings are always forced to act without any kind of guarantee or certainty about what will happen.
Themes
Near the blind man’s house, the other man can only find parking on a street so narrow that the blind man has to get out of the car before the driver parks. When the blind man gets out, he feels “abandoned” and panics until the driver taps his arm and begins leading him inside. The blind man isn’t sure if his wife will be around, and his neighbors watch him curiously but do not ask what has happened. The driver takes the blind man upstairs to his apartment and offers to keep him company until the blind man’s wife returns, but the blind man finds this offer suspicious and says that “there’s no need, please don’t bother.” The driver lets himself out, and the blind man hears the elevator start to descend. “Forgetting the state in which he [finds] himself,” the blind man instinctively looks out his door’s peephole, but he only sees “an impenetrable whiteness.”
The blind man’s sense of “abandon[ment]” shows that, without sight, he feels that he cannot confirm the existence of anybody else. But it also reflects a sense of human spiritual abandonment or isolation, in the sense that people are fundamentally alone in their individual decisions and feelings. His suspicion that the altruistic fellow driver might have ulterior motives might seem unfair, but they reflect his recognition that people are as capable of evil as they are of good, and that people are often blind to one another’s true intentions or capacities. Further, the blind man’s illogical instinct to look out the door’s peephole reflects the extent to which his blindness will inhibit his perception and his ability to navigate the world.
Themes
The blind man knows he is at home because of “the smell, the atmosphere, [and] the silence.” He feels the textures and forms of the objects in his apartment, but they start to blend together. He remembers pretending to be blind as a child and concluding that blindness meant “the simple absence of light” but did not change things themselves. But now, his blindness has “swallowed up […] things and beings” themselves, which have become “twice as invisible.” On his way to the living room, he knocks over a vase of flowers, which shatters. He tries to recover the flowers, but cuts himself on a piece of glass and struggles to get to the sofa, where he wraps his bleeding finger in a handkerchief and falls asleep. He dreams of seeing again, but he begins to awaken and realizes that he is afraid of opening his eyes.
As the blind man learns to navigate the world using his other senses, he is more aware of what he misses than what he can still detect. Home is now a general feeling, the result of various senses mixed together—but without sight, it feels like a foreign and foreboding place. It seems that the things in his house are not real in the same way now that he cannot see them: indeed, his injury shows how helpless he is without the eyesight around which he has organized his entire life. His dream shows that his brain clearly remembers what sight is like, but he wakes up to something more like a nightmare.
Themes
The blind man’s wife awakens him by asking, “what are you doing there?” while she cleans up the water and broken glass on the floor. At first, she is frustrated that he did not clean up his mess, but then she notices his bleeding finger and rushes over. The man opens his eyes and discovers that he is still blind—he tells his wife, who initially thinks he is joking but then starts crying and embracing him. His wife insists that he will get better and needs to see a doctor. She calls a number she finds in the phone book, and the doctor agrees to see her husband immediately.
Like the other drivers at the stoplight, the blind man’s wife is initially unprepared to face such a bizarre and inexplicable situation. Her instinct to turn to medicine is a familiar one, but the man’s sudden blindness also conveys a sense of mysticism that’s outside of human control. Further, the blind man’s ability to turn to the doctor is a direct result of relatively recent developments in human technology and society—in other words, the phone call to the doctor shows how modern human beings are deeply dependent on one another and on technology.
Themes
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After disinfecting and wrapping the blind man’s finger, the blind man’s wife takes him downstairs to find the car. The blind man does not know where the keys are, but his wife has a set, so he waits in the lobby while she looks for the car. But the car is nowhere to be found: the “good Samaritan” from before has stolen it. The blind man’s wife curses the car-thief and leads her husband to a taxi that is waiting outside. The blind man contemplates his misfortune during the taxi ride, and when they arrive at the doctor’s office, they wait in a room with various people with obvious eye problems, “but no one who was blind, [because] blind people do not consult an ophthalmologist.” Fortunately, the doctor calls in the blind man immediately, over the protests of the other patients.
Just as the blind man predicted, the helpful stranger turned out to be taking advantage of him while he was in the midst of a traumatic experience. As such, this thief illustrates Saramago’s skepticism of human beings, who may all harbor such sinister self-interest. By noting that “blind people do not consult an ophthalmologist,” the narrator illustrates how the blind man’s case is truly beyond the realm of ordinary human experience, but also points out the irony in modern society, in which medicine cannot help the people who need it most.
Themes
Inside the doctor’s office, the blind man explains what has happened. He has no personal or family history of eye problems, related diseases, general risk factors, or recent head injuries. The doctor examines the man with a machine, but nothing is abnormal and there is seemingly no explanation for his blindness. The doctor has never seen something like this—the man’s condition seemingly has no medical precedent. The doctor cannot prescribe any treatment, so he sends the man and his wife away with a list of tests to have done. On the way out, the doctor assures them, “let’s wait and see, you mustn’t despair.” That night, the blind man dreams that he’s blind.
Medicine is incapable of explaining or resolving the man’s blindness, which seems to have a supernatural or immaterial cause, unlike most of the problems that humans face (and are capable of resolving through science and government). But this does not change the fact that the blind man must now adapt to his new circumstances, and this struggle in the face of an inexplicable crisis is a metaphor for the human condition as a whole. The doctor’s injunction to “wait and see” shows that, in his rational medical attitude toward risk and uncertainty, hope is just as logical as disappointment when one is faced with inexplicable causes and effects. Meanwhile, the man’s dream implies that he is finally beginning to grasp the reality of his condition and accept that it may be permanent.
Themes
