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Chapter 4
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
In the morning, the doctor’s wife is awake but afraid to open her eyes. When she finally does, she discovers that she can still see, and she accidentally says so out loud. Fortunately, she sees that everyone is still asleep. She realizes that the patients are powerless, but nobody is coming for them or even knows they are there: “any day now,” she even thinks, “we shall no longer know who we are.” Like dogs, they do not need names anymore. The car-thief wakes, groaning in pain, and the doctor’s wife realizes that the patients cannot access medicine for him. She goes and adjusts his bandage, then gazes at the doctor and starts wishing that she was blind too, so that she could see the “inner side” of things.
The doctor’s wife is genuinely surprised: just as inexplicably as everybody else has gone blind, she seems to be retaining her sight. Her realization that the blind are losing their identities suggests both that identities are flexible in principle and that sight plays a crucial part in how humans discern themselves from different people and things. If the blind, when clustered together, become like animals and treat one another as indistinct and homogeneous, then everyone else is just a few steps from living in the same conditions—in other words, human life and society are just as fragile as they are complex. The narrator emphasizes this loss of identity by refraining from naming the characters or describing much about them. However, the doctor’s wife’s hope that she’ll go blind to see the “inner side” of things suggests that the internees’ blindness is a metaphor for some deeper, spiritual kind of vision or knowledge.
Themes
Outside, “angry voices” signal the arrival of more blind patients. When they enter, the doctor explains that there are six patients already in the hospital and that they have room for all the newcomers. The five new patients, who just crossed from the hospital’s other wing, introduce themselves and choose beds. The first blind man recognizes the blind man’s wife’s voice, and the narrator reveals that the other new patients are “the pharmacist's assistant who sold eye-drops to the girl with dark glasses,” “the taxi-driver who took the first blind man to the doctor,” the policeman who took the car-thief home after the thief went blind, and the maid who discovered the girl with the glasses screaming in the hotel. However, the patients themselves may not realize this or even remember one another.
The newcomers are simply more people who have had contact with the existing internees, and except in the case of the first blind man and his wife, it is unclear whether their previous relationships will have any significance in the quarantine zone. Regardless, quarantine seems to be a kind of equalizer for these characters, who are now forced to confront one another as unfamiliar individuals solely on the basis of their shared humanity, rather than on the complex social roles that defined their interactions before.
Themes
The first blind man tells the first blind man’s wife that the car-thief is there, and she initially thinks that the car-thief’s blindness is a form of poetic justice. But they pity the man for his wound, which is getting worse—the doctor admits that is infected but that he cannot do anything about it. The girl with the glasses approaches the car-thief and asks him to forgive her, but the car-thief tells her to “forget it.”
While the car-thief’s blindness and festering wound would be read as punishments for his immoral behavior, this view of events seems just as plausible as the car-thief’s own amoral worldview, in which people act selfishly and deal with whatever fate happens to hand them—this is why he does not hold the girl morally responsible for his injury.
Themes
Suddenly, the loudspeaker announces that “food has been left at the entrance.” The doctor and his wife go to collect it, but they continue to the main door and tell the soldiers that they need medicine for the car-thief. The soldier on duty says that this is not his business and orders them back inside. The doctor’s wife thinks this is “against all the rules of humanity,” but she and the doctor return inside and admit that medicine is not coming. The food—milk and biscuits for five people—is not enough, and there are no plates or silverware. The injured car-thief vomits up his food, and after they eat, the first blind man and his wife take a walk around the hospital wing.
The Government remains vague and distant—the soldiers confirm that the Government is interested in protecting the rest of the city from the patients, not protecting the patients themselves with medicine and proper care. The Government has resolved to view the patients as enemies and criminals, even though they are not guilty of anything, and the doctor’s wife struggles to make sense of this dehumanization. When she declares that this is “against all the rules of humanity,” Saramago is suggesting that a government’s commitment to protect its citizens is only a theoretical pact, an idea that it can never fulfill in practice. He seems to be pessimistic about politics and humanity in general, which is always fragile and imperfect. In times of crisis like the blindness epidemic, the ugliest and most selfish aspects of human nature seem to dominate people’s actions.
Themes
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At the pharmacist’s assistant’s behest, the doctor explains what he researched just before going blind. After he finishes, the taxi-driver chimes in with his opinion: “the channels that go from the eyes to the brain got congested.” The pharmacist’s assistant calls him a foolish, but the doctor remarks that “in truth the eyes are nothing more than lenses”—it’s a person’s brain that allows them to see. He admits that he does not know how long everyone will be sick or stuck in the ward. The hotel maid comments that she wants to know how the naked girl with the dark glasses ended up; when she says this, the girl takes her glasses off. The doctor’s wife starts to feel “contemptible and obscene” for observing the others, who still do not know that she can see.
The taxi-driver and pharmacist clash over the legitimacy of scientifically-informed versus uninformed speculation, but ultimately neither of them can explain their blindness, which has completely blurred the normal authority of science. Ultimately, each chooses the explanation that is more useful for their own purposes. Indeed, the doctor’s admission that “the eyes are nothing more than lenses” establishes that vision is a psychological property as well as a physical one, which further supports the notion that the characters’ blindness represents some deeper disorientation or loss of perspective. Further, the doctor’s wife realizes that her sight, by giving her knowledge of things that are invisible to everyone else, confers on her a kind of responsibility for the wellbeing of everybody else. This feels “contemptible and obscene” not only because she is deceiving the others, but also because it seems to suggest that she is somehow superior to them in terms of both power and responsibility.
Themes
At lunchtime, the first blind man and the taxi-driver crawl outside into the corridor to retrieve the food, and they return by following a rope that the doctor’s wife has made out of blankets. There are still only five portions of food, and the soldiers probably do not even know that more people have entered this wing of the hospital. The taxi-driver goes outside and yells that there are 11 of them now, but the police sergeant dismisses him. Back inside, the patients divide up their rations while the injured car-thief, who does not eat, periodically moans in pain.
Again, while the blind internees plead to be taken seriously, as human beings who deserve fair treatment and are guaranteed rights by the Government, the soldiers dismiss them without a second thought. Clearly, the soldiers and Government do not have power because they have people’s best interests in mind. Rather, the mere status of their positions (and the fact that they are armed) means that they can forcibly command the obedience of others. This contrasts with the doctor’s wife’s authority, which is legitimate because she can see, but unwanted because it feels like a burden.
Themes
Soon, three more people arrive: one of the doctor’s employees, the man from the hotel with whom the girl with the dark glasses had sex, and the rude policeman who took the girl home. Then, a huge crowd of uproarious blind people stumbles into the ward. The people who cannot find a bed leave for another ward, and the Government’s instructions play on the loudspeaker. The newcomers protest that they were promised a cure, not a quarantine, and the doctor notes that things in the hospital are becoming tense. No more food comes on this day, and the injured car-thief’s leg is “completely swollen” by the evening. Whispering desperately, he tells the doctor’s wife, “I know you can see”—but she denies it, goes back to bed, and tells the doctor that the thief’s infection is serious.
As more internees move into the hospital, they overturn the fragile order that the small community of patients had already established. The large crowd also signals that the epidemic is only worsening outside the hospital’s walls. These newcomers are too numerous to be named or meaningfully discerned, and they become an anonymous and dehumanized mass to the readers, much like they are to the protagonists. Given the soldiers’ indifference to the internees’ wellbeing, the patients are right to be skeptical about the Government’s promise of a cure to their illness. Meanwhile, the car-thief’s critical condition also seems to be beneficial (though morally complicated) for the doctor’s wife, who cannot risk revealing that she can still see.
Themes
After most of the patients fall asleep, the car-thief manages to get out of bed—he wants to go outside and plead for help. After falling down, he crawls outside to the hospital’s front door, where he reflects on the morality of stealing the first blind man’s car. He falls down the hospital’s front steps and, once he overcomes the extreme pain, pulls himself towards the main gate along the rope that has been put up as a handrail. The soldier who is stationed at the gate fires his gun as soon as he notices the car-thief. By the time the other soldiers arrive, the car-thief is dead in a pool of his own blood, which the sergeant warns could be infectious. A group of the blind has followed the commotion outside, and the sergeant orders them to retrieve the car-thief’s body.
The car-thief has been a villainous and morally indefensible character until now, but now his desperation evokes pity. This situation cannot be analyzed in the black-and-white terms of moral good and evil—rather, the reader is again forced to invert their moral presuppositions: when the criminal becomes a victim, the soldiers’ indifference to his rights and dignity must also be recognized as a crime. In fact, by remorselessly killing the car-thief, the soldiers commit the most unconscionable moral injustice yet. The quarantine already threatens to reveal humanity’s most evil instincts, and the Government’s treatment of the patients resembles the way in which marginalized people and prisoners of war were interned and tortured in the 20th century.
Themes
