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Chapter 9
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
The old man with the eyepatch does not give away his radio with the valuables. Just to be cautious, he starts secretly listening to his news program in bed, then relaying any important news to the people next to him, who gradually pass it around the room and end up distorting it in the process. That same night, the announcer on this program screams out that he has gone blind. Knowing that the show’s whole crew will follow and the program will never return, the man with the eyepatch begins to cry.
Like in a game of “telephone,” the news gradually changes as the patients pass it on, adapting it to their own purposes and leaving their own mark on it. But this does not have significant consequences, because for them the news is just a story that has no obvious bearing on their everyday lives in quarantine. However, for the old man, these stories represent his last connection to the world outside the quarantine. The news crew’s blindness, which literally prevents them from getting the perspective on the world that they need to produce news stories, signifies that the internees are again locked in their own experience, with no outside narratives to sustain their hope for the future.
Themes
Fortunately, the internees have eaten three full meals, and they sleep peacefully. The narrator suggests that this might even mean that “the concentration of food supplies” has “positive aspects.” Meanwhile, the doctor’s wife is lying awake, thinking about the doctor’s comment that one of the thugs might be a spy who is actually not blind. Of course, the doctor’s wife can still see, but she has seen such “horror” that she wishes she were blind. She sees that the girl with the glasses and the boy with the squint have pushed their beds together and realizes she can do the same with her husband. Then, she starts thinking about the scissors.
The narrator facetiously praises “the concentration of food supplies” in the same sarcastic way that workers might praise their bosses or citizens might praise a government that rules over them. The blind people are grateful for the hand that feeds them, even though it is actually oppressing them, and they don’t fully understand the larger structures that prevent them from getting what they actually deserve. The doctor’s wife is frightened at the thought that she has a counterpart who is using their power for evil rather than good—still, by fantasizing about going blind, she continues to wish away her moral responsibility rather than boldly accepting and acting on it. But, as she contemplates the beds and the scissors, she reveals that she is starting to inch toward action.
Themes
The doctor’s wife sneaks out to the hallway without alerting anyone. She sees some internees sleeping on the hallway’s floor: they are the people couldn’t find a bed when they first arrived in the hospital.” She stops to watch a couple have sex—not because she’s jealous, but because she feels sympathy for them. At the front door, she sees one of the soldiers guarding the gate and senses a profound silence that makes it seems as though “the whole of humanity […] had disappeared.” The blind, the doctor’s wife thinks, cannot tell day from night, and the guards do not know about the war happening inside. She wonders what to do with the scissors. A guard notices the doctor’s wife sitting down on the steps and he shines his light at her as a warning, so she goes back inside and heads to the thugs’ ward.
When the doctor’s wife observes the people sleeping and having sex on the floor, she finally allows herself to process the extent to which the people around her are suffering: their most basic needs are denied, and they are losing the drive to satisfy all but the most fundamental biological instincts. People have these instincts all the time, of course, but people often imagine their “humanity” in terms of their ability to transcend these basic instincts and dedicate themselves to more complex and specialized tasks. The doctor’s wife’s sight, which she shares with the guard outside (who does not know she can see) is clearly a metaphor for her ability to continue pursuing higher tasks, the responsibility for which weighs on her more and more with every passing day.
Themes
A man stands guard outside the thieves’ ward, waving a short stick back and forth. The doctor’s wife approaches him and then looks over his shoulder into the ward, but the man seems to sense her presence and starts looking for an intruder. Eventually, he gives up, and the doctor’s wife gets a good look at the 20 people and the pile of food boxes inside. The guard goes to sleep, and the doctor’s wife wonders what to do. She realizes that she cannot blame the guard for the gang’s thievery—instead, she feels “a strange compassion” for him, and then “a cold shiver” that is either a fever or perhaps something deeper within her soul. She slowly walks back to her ward, and on the way she passes blind people who are oblivious to her presence.
The doctor’s wife inches closer and closer to accepting the moral authority that seems to have fallen into her lap, simply because of her inexplicable continued ability to see. Perhaps her sight has conferred a sense of responsibility on her, or perhaps it has simply allowed her to see the dehumanizing and horrific conditions in which all of the internees are living in a way that they others cannot. Either way, the doctor’s wife is still thinking about what to do in terms of morality, justice, and empathy, while the rest of the blind people are simply thinking in terms of self-preservation. While she has to fight people who are acting on this basis—like the guard who works for the thugs—she also empathizes with them, realizing that they are doing what they believe is necessary for their survival.
Themes
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