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Chapter 13
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
Although they have not yet figured out how to wash, the group led by the doctor’s wife is well-fed and dressed stylishly—most of them wear functional rubber boots. The blind people who surround them wander around with no sense of purpose or direction, constantly searching for food.” There is no music, theaters and museums stand empty, and there are no seeing scientists left to work on a cure nor doctors left to treat the blind. Patients fled hospitals when they ran out of food, and many died on the streets and were devoured by dogs. The doctor’s wife tells her companions what the world is like now: inside and outside seem indistinguishable, and people have all become “like ghosts,” who are “certain that life exists” but “unable to see it.”
Knowing that nobody will be able to see them, the doctor’s wife dresses her compatriots fashionably because this small luxury represents a return to the conventions and concerns of everyday life before the outbreak. Now, the contrast between their group and city’s other desperate blind inhabitants, who spend all of their time searching for food, highlights the extent to which the doctor’s wife’s sight gives her group an advantage that allows them to hold onto more of their humanity than the others. When the doctor’s wife compares the blind to “ghosts,” however, she also recalls the way her group felt in the hospital, where everyone’s blindness led them to metaphorically lose sight of the purpose of their lives and actions. In fact, it could be argued that the doctor’s wife’s group is able to pursue goals besides mere survival because they grew stronger in the hospital.
Themes
The group slowly makes its way to the home of the girl with dark glasses, which is on a narrow and deserted street. Her apartment window is open, and the building’s front door has been forcibly opened, but the doctor’s wife doesn’t point any of this out. Instead, she follows the girl up the stairs, where the girl knocks and yells for her parents. Nobody is there, and the girl starts crying. The doctor’s wife suggests asking the neighbors—but there is no answer next door, the apartments upstairs have been broken into and completely “ransacked.”
In the hospital, the doctor’s wife often withheld details from the others because she did not want to reveal that she could see. Here, however, she does so out of a desire to protect the girl with the glasses: the doctor’s wife does not want to scare or confuse the girl by revealing that her apartment building appears to be abandoned. Unable to enter her apartment or reunite with her family, the girl is forced to finally confront the fact that she will never be able to return to the life and identity she had before going blind.
Themes
Downstairs, however, “a gruff voice” answers the door. It belongs to an old woman, who explains that the girl’s parents—and the woman’s own family—were taken away just after the girl. The old woman hid upstairs, then broke back into her apartment. She took all the building’s food—the girl asks if any remains, but the woman distrustfully says that there is none. Now, the old woman eats whatever she finds in the garden, including raw rabbit and chicken. The doctor’s wife promises to share food with the woman, who tells the girl with the glasses that she can return to her apartment. Wanting to feel around her old room, the girl follows the old woman through her putrid-smelling apartment, full of animal carcasses and scraps of rotting meat, to a staircase that leads to her former apartment.
In part, the old woman living downstairs represents the isolation and suspicion that took over the internees in the hospital, as each of them began thinking only about their own survival. To an extent, the group led by the doctor’s wife managed to avoid this because of the social bonds they formed from the beginning of their time in the hospital, which have allowed them to avoid the isolation that the old woman—and, likely, many of the city’s residents—are experiencing. In other words, the group’s empathetic concern for and social bond with one another allow them to survive and sustain a sense of purpose.
Themes
The doctor’s wife notes that the girl’s apartment remains “clean and tidy,” in contrast to the back gardens, which are like “jungles.” The girl passes through her apartment by memory and comes to her parents’ unmade bed, then breaks into tears. In her own room, she feels the dead flowers in an old vase and contemplates the fragility of life. The doctor’s wife looks down at the rest of the group out of the window, and the girl, who has found the keys in the front door, tells her to invite everyone upstairs. The doctor’s wife leads everyone up the stairs, where the old woman approaches them, frustratedly demands her food, and then becomes hysterical when nobody replies to her. The dog of tears barks at the old woman, causing her to run back to her apartment.
The girl’s “clean and tidy” though dust-filled apartment reminds the protagonists of the social order that the city has been forced to leave behind because of blindness. This has reduced them from participants in a complex society to creatures constantly fighting for their own survival who are, like the paranoid old woman, better suited to a “jungle.” While the protagonists yearn for and cherish this social order, which they have begun to establish by forming a collective of their own, the dead flowers symbolize how all of society is just one crisis away from collapse.
Themes
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The doctor’s wife lights two candles, and the group has “a family feast,”—but not until the girl and the doctor’s wife go downstairs to bring some food to the old woman. The woman complains that they are wasting food on the dog, but she thanks them and gives them a key to the building’s back door. Back upstairs, after everyone else goes to bed, the doctor’s wife and the girl sit together in the kitchen like a mother and daughter would.
Like their clothes at the beginning of this chapter, the protagonists’ dinner shows that they are beginning to reconstruct the comforts and social bonds of everyday life, albeit in a radically altered form, and creating a kind of surrogate family that provides everybody with the enduring, loving bonds that have all but disappeared during the blindness epidemic.
Themes
The doctor’s wife asks if the girl has plans, and the girl says she will wait for her parents, but the doctor’s wife points out that this is both lonely and dangerous: the girl could become like the old woman downstairs or have to compete with her for food. The girl says that she does not care: she thinks that everyone is already dead because they’re blind or blind because they’re dead. But the doctor’s wife remarks that she can still see, which gives her a “responsibility” to help as many people as possible. Besides, the girl’s parents might even be different people—in fact, now that blind people are the majority, everything is changing and unpredictable. The whole group, the doctor’s wife insists, should come to her house—but especially the girl, who has become “like a sister” to her.
The girl is forced to choose between waiting for her biological family, the social unit that defined her in the past, and continuing to live with and support her new adopted family, which supports and cares for her but is defined by their shared trauma. The girl wants to undo the experiences of the last several weeks and simply return to her old life, but she struggles to accept that this is simply not possible. Curiously, most of the other characters are optimistic in this section of the book, but girl seems to have already given up—although the doctor’s wife forces her to see possibilities that she would rather forget. At last, the doctor’s wife explicitly points out the connection between her sight and her sense of moral responsibility.
Themes
In the morning, the boy with the squint visits the bathroom, but he discovers that the old woman has long since plugged it up. Instead, he goes in the back yard alongside everyone but the doctor’s wife, who watches and cries. Back upstairs, they clean themselves with “sheets and towels” and then they eat.
The doctor’s wife despairs to see the people whose humanity she is trying to preserve and rescue reduced to the animalistic desperation of going to the bathroom outside. While this shows how far they have strayed, it also reveals how deeply the doctor’s wife is invested in them.
Themes
Over breakfast, the doctor’s wife declares that the group must come up with a plan. The whole city is blind, there are no public services or supplies, and nobody knows if there is a government or a future to look forward to. The doctor’s wife wants the group to “stay together,” rather than risk “be[ing] swallowed up by the masses and destroyed.” The doctor points out that there are groups of blind people, but his wife notes that they are disorganized and unstable. In contrast, she can be this group’s leader, and she proposes that everyone move into her house. The others agree, but they ask to also visit their own homes—except the man with the eyepatch, who has no family and lived in a small rented room. He simply asks the others to tell him if he becomes too much of a burden on them.
The doctor’s wife essentially proposes to the rest that they formalize their arrangement and officially start living as a family, which is the smallest-scale and most rudimentary form of society or government. Everyone else in the city is caught up in their individual desires and thus becomes one among many, “swallowed up by the masses” and are only members in a group because of their own self-interest. But the protagonists can insist on maintaining the kind of social concern and selfless love that the blindness epidemic has forced the rest of society to shed. In fact, the man with the eyepatch, who does not have any biological family, shows how the kind of isolation and abandonment that the protagonists fear is actually a common part of modern life, even though social bonds are one of the most fundamental and irreplaceable elements of the human experience.
Themes
Just before leaving, the seven survivors give the old lady some more food and the keys to the girl’s flat, and then they watch the dog of tears eating a hen in the yard and hastily burying its carcass. Just after it finishes, the old woman asks the group to control the dog before he kills one of her hens. She also hears the doctor’s wife say that she “can’t see a thing” on the way out—this raises the old woman’s suspicions, but she later decides that she must have heard the doctor’s wife wrong. Meanwhile, the doctor’s wife reminds herself to watch her words.
The comedic conflict over the hen between the old woman and the dog of tears shows that the women is always one step behind, just as she suspects something unusual but does not connect the dots and realize that the doctor’s wife can see. Still, readers might wonder why the doctor’s wife does not also adopt the old lady into her family and care for her, as she does for the rest. After all, the doctor’s wife has nothing to lose by revealing that she can see, and she seems to be willfully abandoning the old lady, just like all the blind people at the supermarket.
Themes
The doctor’s wife organizes the group into two lines and leads them with a rope. When they leave, the old woman cries because her life is lonely and meaningless. Throughout the city, blind people are still out looking for food, mostly unsuccessfully. They cannot cook anything, and dogs and cats—the most accessible meat—have learned to “hunt in packs and […] defend themselves.” The doctor’s wife notes that the group has one more meal worth of food, and another day’s worth in her house (unless someone has broken in). On the way, the streets are full of trash and feces, and the group passes a pack of dogs eating a man’s corpse. The doctor’s wife vomits in disgust, but she tells the others that the dogs were eating another dog, instead of a human.
The rope symbolizes the protagonists’ decision to formalize their social tie and start living as a family, and the old woman’s tears demonstrate that, despite her isolation and despair, meeting the protagonists has reminded her that humans are inherently social beings who require community, empathy, and solidarity in order to lead meaningful lives. The city’s state of disrepair shows that most people are living like the old woman—all the comforts and conveniences of modern society have collapsed. In fact, everybody in the city is now living exactly like the cats and dogs by “hunt[ing] in packs,” which are bonds of convenience and not of true social concern. In other words, the other groups of blind people are not families or communities.
Themes
The group passes through a wide street with tall buildings and expensive cars that now house blind people. There is even a limousine that took a bank chairman to an emergency meeting from which he never returned because he went blind in the stuck elevator after the power went out. The narrator comments that “all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.” The doctor’s wife asks about the banks, and the man with the eyepatch remembers that it was chaotic: everyone withdrew their money, the banks collapsed, the Government tried and failed to take over these banks, and then people looted everything they could find inside—they went so far as robbing ATM machines. People even moved into banks, hoping to get into their safety deposit boxes.
This important downtown neighborhood, where many financial and political decisions with profound social impacts were probably made, has been turned into housing for homeless blind residents who probably do not even know what street they are living on. Not only are social distinctions overturned, then, but this happened just like the bankers’ backroom decisions and, according to the narrator, like all origin stories—secretly, even though “everyone knows what happened.” Indeed, the story that the man with the eyepatch tells shows how all distinctions of class and power became irrelevant when everyone lost their sight, but people clearly did not know how to adapt: like the thugs in the hospital, they continued to seek out money even though they knew it would not be good for anything.
Themes
In the late afternoon, the group reaches the doctor and his wife’s house, which is on a street that’s indistinguishable from the others except that there happen to be two enormous rats outside. The doctor’s wife is not nostalgic, but she rather feels disappointed by the filth she sees all around. The group enters the building where the doctor and his wife live and they slowly make their way up to the fifth floor, passing some former residents and some newcomers on the way. The doctor’s wife simply says, “we used to live here,” and then continues to her apartment’s front door, where she helps her husband with the keys.
The doctor and his wife’s building is anonymous and indistinct, mixed in with the rest of the street just like the protagonists are mixed in with the city’s stumbling, blind residents. Along with the doctor and his wife’s indifference to their neighbors, this reminds the reader that they are only hearing one particular story from one particular group of people affected by the novel’s radical events. Numerous other perspectives are possible, and they would yield a variety of different stories and lessons.
Themes
