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Chapter 12
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
There’s a big difference between “rational labyrinth” of the hospital and “the demented labyrinth of the city.” The blind huddle together outside the hospital, unsure of where to go and afraid to move, hoping that the soldiers will return to with food to give them. They speculate about whether there might be a cure. Some say that they will wait until dawn, when they feel the sun, and others fall asleep—some do not awaken. The doctor’s wife, wearing rags from the waist down and naked from the waist up, agrees that it is best to wait for morning. She starts planning a route to bring the blind from her ward to their homes. When the fire stops burning, the night grows cold—the blind sleep lightly, crowded together like a single, suffering entity.
The contrast between the hospital’s “rational labyrinth” and the city’s “demented” one is not only a commentary on their architecture: it also ironically points out how life was regimented and familiar to the patients in the hospital, but is now foreign and unknown in the city where they used to live. Their attachment to the familiar and fear of the unknown, a conventional human impulse now heightened by crisis, leads them to cling to the very hospital that has been a symbol of their oppression and powerlessness. Just as the narrator called them “madmen” but now calls the hospital a “rational” place, what used to look like evil oppression has started looking benevolent for the blind. This narrative trick demonstrates how easily opposites like good and evil, rational and irrational, and allies and enemies can flip when contexts change.
Themes
It rains in the morning, which convinces some of the inmates that the soldiers will not bring their food. Led by the doctor’s wife, “the woman with eyes that can see,” some of the blind muster up their last strength and head for the city center. The doctor’s wife wants to leave the others somewhere so that she can search for food on her own. The streets and all the shops are empty, perhaps because it’s early or perhaps because it’s raining, so the doctor’s wife leads the group to a shop, where she notices people lying on the floor. One man walks up to the door, sticks his arm out and tells the others, “It’s raining.” He is blind—and so are all the rest.
The soldiers’ complete disappearance is a more compelling reason to think they will not bring food, but the internees seem to choose the rain because this provides a more soothing and comfortable narrative: the soldiers are still out there, thinking about the internees’ dietary needs—they are just unable to come today. Realizing that this is absurd, the doctor’s wife takes the leadership role she has already assigned herself. The city is an eerie shell of its former self, which suggests that the blindness epidemic has fundamentally transformed it: the blind can no longer hope to return to their previous lives. Rather, they must figure out how to fashion new ones entirely.
Themes
The doctor’s wife introduces herself and explains her group’s predicament. But the man reveals that the entire country has gone blind and that anyone who can still see keeps it a secret. In order not to lose other people, everyone looks for food in groups and takes shelter wherever they can. The people who managed to lock themselves in food stores were lucky at first but soon became targets: the man even remembers hearing that one food store got burned down with its residents inside. When the rain stops, the man tells the other members of his group, who grab their bags and head outside in their heavy winter clothing. Gradually, such groups fill the street, relieving themselves and wandering around in search of food.
The internees’ worst fears—and possibly also the reader’s suspicions—are proven true: everyone is blind, and the world outside the hospital now represents the world inside. If alliances and organizations forming inside the hospital seemed like a small-scale representation of primitive societies forming in the real world, that is because it was: now, the entire world is forced to endure the same terrors that the doctor’s wife and her group already went through in quarantine. Of course, the blind man ironically suggests that some people might be able to see while talking to the doctor’s wife—possibly the only person who truly can see. But he recognizes both that the blind and the seeing are indistinguishable and that sight can be a danger or burden—like the responsibility the doctor’s wife has reluctantly chosen to accept.
Themes
The doctor’s wife leads her group into the empty store, which is full of electric appliances and contains nothing useful in terms of food or clothing. The group settles inside, and the doctor’s wife tells them to wait for her to return (hopefully with food and clothes) and not to leave under any circumstances. Uncertain how far she will have to go to find food, the doctor’s wife notes the address. All around, she sees people walking up and down the street clinging to walls, sniffing around in search of food. She goes directly into the food stores she can see, but they are completely ransacked and barren.
The city of blind people is one in which the hallmarks of modern society have been rendered irrelevant: just like the valuables that the thugs insisted on collecting inside the hospital, now appliances and other modern consumer goods are completely useless. People instead focus on fulfilling their most basic needs, which demonstrates how the complexity of modern society is ultimately unnecessary to fulfill these needs. Rather than performing their individual specialized functions, people all take up the same work—hunting for food—and form rudimentary groups like dogs form packs.
Themes
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The doctor’s wife scours the city until she finds a supermarket, which is just as empty as the rest of the food stores. Inside, groups of blind people are crawling around, looking for food. One man gets a piece of glass stuck in his knee and complains about the “pricking”—his companions laugh at the sexual double-entendre and a woman goodheartedly fishes it out. The doctor’s wife wonders about the group’s morals and, watching those around her fight for food, admits to herself, “Hell, I’ll never get out of here.” But then she realizes that there is probably a storeroom of extra product somewhere near the supermarket, so she begins searching around. At the end of a long hallway, she finds a door that leads to a basement staircase, and she smells food behind it.
The doctor’s wife gives her group an extraordinary advantage, one that seemed like a blessing in the quarantine zone but starts to look unfair and unearned in this part of the novel. But her zealous and determined search for food contrasts with the blind scavengers’ calmness and sense of humor, reminding her that the world—even if hungry—may not be under the same acute stress and violence as the internees in the hospital. As the doctor’s wife continues to be affected by the trauma she experienced in the hospital and struggles to adjust to the new circumstances of the city, her sense of crisis is pulled in two directions.
Themes
The doctor’s wife grabs plastic bags for the food and mentally plots out her return to the store where her husband and companions from the hospital are waiting. Then, she starts descending into the pitch-black basement and begins to panic: in the dark, she finally feels like she’s blind. Three flights down, she nearly faints out of terror and starts crawling around, looking for food. She finds various containers full of various kinds of food and starts filling the plastic bags. She knocks over a stack of matchboxes and, delighted, lights one. “Praised be light,” she thinks, filling her bags with a huge amount of goods. Lighting match after match to guide her way, she eats some packs of chorizo sausage and bread before climbing the stairs back to the supermarket.
Although the doctor’s wife has made it to the storeroom through a combination of reason and sight—which generally go hand-in-hand throughout this novel—she soon finds both of these faculties useless in helping her descend to the basement. Now, she is forced into an experiment in radical empathy: momentarily struck blind, she confronts the terror that everybody around her has been experiencing. The reader, who has largely followed the doctor’s wife’s perspective through the narrative and has accordingly been able to understand events through what is visible to her, is also suddenly forced to imagine this same darkness and confusion.
Themes
The doctor’s wife debates whether to tell the other blind people in the supermarket about the food downstairs, but she decides against it and justifies this decision by telling herself that the blind would injure themselves on their way down the stairs. (An added bonus, of course, is that she can return for more food when she needs it.) She runs out through the supermarket, past the blind people who are starting to smell and shout about the sausage she has eaten. Out of fear, she starts sprinting, indiscriminately running into people and knocking them over in cruel manner. Outside, it is raining—the blind use buckets, bowls, and pans to collect water.
By saying nothing about the storeroom, the doctor’s wife (for perhaps the first time in the novel) makes a self-interested decision that is arguably immoral, as she’s looking out for own group but also denying food to other starving people. This shows how all people, even those who are generally morally good, can act selfishly and evilly under particular circumstances and pressures: the doctor’s wife has turned from a heroic savior to a “wholly reprehensible” thief.
Themes
The doctor’s wife trudges onward, noting the street signs as she passes, until “she realizes that she has lost her way.” She sits and weeps, and then a group of dogs approaches her, sniffing at the food. She embraces one of the dogs, which licks up her tears, and then looks up and sees “a great map before her.” Its destiny must have been to appear, the narrator says, and the doctor’s wife follows it back to the store a few blocks away.
The doctor’s wife’s confusion is also a metaphor for the way that she has morally “lost her way” by keeping the secret storeroom to herself. Like her personal crisis after killing the thugs’ leader, her emotional breakdown here represents her moral reckoning with her own behavior. That time, the doctor’s wife reminded herself that her actions were necessary, but this time, she cannot. Meanwhile, the dog she meets appears to feel an empathy that even the novel’s human characters have lost.
Themes
When the doctor’s wife arrives at the store, she announces that she has food. Her companions wake up from “dreaming they were stones” and “transform themselves into persons” as they dig into the food. While they eat, the doctor’s wife recounts her journey to find the food, although she does not tell them that she decided to leave the door to the storeroom closed. They even feed the “dog of tears,” who barks at the people who approach their door.
The other characters’ symbolic transformation from inanimate “stones” to “persons” suggests that, after multiple days without food, the rations the doctor’s wife provides give them something of a new lease on life. Although they do not fully explain why, they even adopt the dog into their group. This could be interpreted either as a meaningful act of gratitude or a sign that the group is unfairly excluding other humans in order to feed an animal in their place.
Themes
After they finish eating, the doctor’s wife concludes that the group can’t know whether they’ll find their homes the way the left time. She wonders whether her own housekeys and scissors would now be melted into one because of the fire that burned down the hospital. Fortunately, the doctor has their keys; then the rest admit that, for various reasons, they do not have their own. Still, they plan to find their homes, starting with that of the girl with dark glasses, who lives closest. But first, they sleep.
The characters’ desire to return home stands for their search for normalcy, comfort, and identity amid the crisis, but the doctor’s wife points out what they all secretly know: there is no way to simply return to the past and, in one way or another, the blindness epidemic has transformed them and the spaces they inhabit.
Themes
