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Chapter 5
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 blind have to bury the car-thief’s body in the courtyard. Only the doctor’s wife sees the corpse, which is horribly disfigured. She can’t find anything with which to dig a grave, although she does glimpse “the terrified faces” of the infected patients across the hospital. She and the doctor consider asking the soldiers for a shovel. Meanwhile, the girl with the glasses cries because she blames herself for the car-thief’s death. The narrator comments that, while it is technically her fault, people can never think through or control all the possible consequences of their actions.
In a society of blind people, it becomes increasingly clear that the doctor’s wife’s ability to see is as much a curse as a blessing: she is forced to confront the horrors of the patients’ internment more fully and viscerally than anyone else. The Government’s failure to provide a shovel is somewhat ironic, since one of its rules is that the internees must bury their own dead—its failure to coordinate its response demonstrates that it is making up its policies as it goes along, which suggests that its power is arbitrary rather than deserved. The narrator’s commentary on causality and moral responsibility further draws out the tension that Saramago sees at the heart of moral thinking: people’s actions (whether good or bad) seldom produce the consequences they intend, so to what extent should they be held responsible for these consequences?
Themes
The girl joins the doctor and his wife to ask the soldiers for a shovel. When they reach the front door, the soldier on duty yells and fires a warning gunshot into the air. The three patients return inside, and then the doctor’s wife comes to the doorway and asks for a spade. However, the sergeant declares that there isn’t anything of the sort at the hospital, and he tries to dissuade the doctor’s wife against burying the body. The doctor’s wife suggests that the car-thief’s body could infect the air and therefore the soldiers. The narrator reveals that this sergeant is new: the first one went blind and is now in the army’s quarantine zone. This sergeant promises to ask for a spade, and the doctor’s wife also asks for more food—but the sergeant replies that this isn’t his responsibility and then disappears.
The soldiers’ warning shot demonstrates that they see the internees as inherently threatening, and they’re willing to respond with unjust and brutal violence (as they did to the car-thief). Of course, the nature of infectious disease is such that merely being in someone’s presence can constitute a risk, and the doctor’s wife clearly understands this when she turns the sergeant’s logic back against him. The fact that the previous sergeant went blind shows that the soldiers’ attempt to contain the infection is futile and that there is no fundamental distinction between the people on either side of the hospital’s gate. In this way, the soldiers’ fears—if not their actions—are justified.
Themes
Later that morning, over the loudspeaker, the Government reports that there is a spade for the patients outside the front door. The doctor’s wife goes to retrieve it—at first she pretends to be blind, but eventually she just grabs the spade and walks straight back to the front door, and the sergeant remarks that the blind are quickly able to adapt and navigate their surroundings.
The sergeant’s ironic misinterpretation of the doctor’s wife’s situation is as close as Saramago gets to comedy. This reminds readers that there are no externally-visible traits that separate the blind from the seeing. More importantly, it illustrates how different characters in the novel, separated only by a gate, form diametrically-opposed narratives in order to justify how they relate to one another.
Themes
The blind dig a shallow grave in the courtyard’s firm soil and toss the car-thief’s body inside. The girl with the glasses proposes putting up a cross, but the others dismiss her idea and go back inside. Everyone has learned to navigate the hospital. The narrator comments that those who are “gifted” even develop “frontal vision” like the doctor’s wife. The doctor and his wife talk lovingly, unlike the first blind man and the first blind man’s wife, who seldom speak. The little boy with the squint continues complaining of hunger, and the girl keeps giving him her food. In fact, there was no breakfast this morning, and now that it is lunchtime, some of the blind are awaiting the next meal in the hallway—they know that food is “first come first served.”
The internees do the bare minimum that is necessary to give the car-thief a proper burial, as they clearly have more important matters to attend to. The narrator echoes the soldier’s comment about the doctor’s wife, both mocking the soldier’s ignorance and pointing out that such “frontal vision” wouldn’t be unthinkable in the world of the novel—after all, the rest of the internees could regain their sight at any time, and the soldiers would probably neither realize nor care. Meanwhile, the girl with the glasses begins to stand in as a mother figure for the little boy—perhaps to assuage her guilt over the car-thief or perhaps out of genuine empathy. In contrast, the other blind internees wait in the hallway for food because they have little trust in the others and so decide that it is better to act in self-interest than to be sorry.
Themes
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Eventually, the soldiers come inside and drop the food containers in the hallway, but they’re terrified when they see the blind patients waiting nearby. Two of the soldiers “react[] admirably” by firing indiscriminately at these patients, whose bodies pile up outside the ward. The soldiers sprint outside, where one insists that he will never go back in. Ironically, the narrator reveals, this man soon goes blind himself. The sergeant, who secretly wishes that the blind would just starve to death, declares over the loudspeaker that the soldiers have subdued a “seditious movement” by killing the patients in the hall—they can’t be blamed for their actions. In the future, the sergeant says, the army will simply leave the food outside the hospital and shoot anyone who gets too close to them.
By sarcastically stating that the soldiers “react[] admirably,” the narrator mocks the absurdity of their actions: not only are they heavily armed against blind people who cannot fight back, but killing the blind will not do anything from preventing the blindness from spreading. Of course, blindness is what the soldiers truly fear, and they likely already know that going blind is inevitable—the massacre simply proves that they are emotionally incapable of accepting this reality. The sergeant’s explanation, while obviously absurd to the reader and the narrator, is designed to further scare the blind—who will never learn the truth about what happened—into submission. But it also seems to be a way to assuage his own guilt by refusing to accept that the people on his side could possibly do anything wrong. Indeed, in hoping that the blind starve and die, he reveals that he has cut off all empathy, as though the position to which he’s been assigned demands it.
Themes
During the shooting, the blind internees are frightened because they assume that the Government has decided to kill them. When those who aren’t yet blind but are assumed to be “contaminated” run out of their wards into the hallway, they see a pile of bodies and a pile of the blind’s food boxes, the latter of which they decide to take. They pause in terror when they realize that they might get infected by the blood of the deceased, whose spirits might come after them, but they take the food anyway. Some blind patients also come to the hallway for food, frightening the contaminated, who feel that the dead are seeking revenge. But instead, these blind patients retrieve the food containers and drag the corpses to the courtyard. One blind woman (the doctor’s wife) seems to be leading the others and often looks over at the contaminated as though she could see or otherwise sense them. Frightened, the contaminated return to their wards.
Having briefly stepped into the soldiers’ perspectives in the previous pages, the narrator now examines the situation from the perspective of “the contaminated,” who share the soldiers’ existential dread at the prospect of going blind. This group also experiences the same fear of death, starvation, and social disorder that the already-blind internees feel. Caught between their hunger and their fear of blindness and divine punishment, they see the blind as a homogenous group—it seems they’ve already adjusted their outlook in response to living in the hospital’s horrific, life-and-death conditions. Meanwhile, the doctor’s wife appears as an ominous, haunting figure—just like the sergeant and the Government do to the blind. This again shows that the question of who stands for good and evil—at least in the world of the novel—largely depends upon subjective perspective and narrative.
Themes
The blind assemble to decide whether to first eat or bury the nine dead, whose identities they do not know. (In fact, they are the man who from the hotel, the taxi-driver, the policeman who took the car-thief home, the policeman who took the girl home, and five people from the other ward.) The group decides to eat first, as this will give them strength to bury the dead. But they struggle to divide the rations: some pretend that they have more people, and ultimately many people get double portions of food. The doctor’s wife sees this but doesn’t say anything: she fears that the others will turn her into a slave if they find out that she can see. She recognizes that the patients need to organize themselves, but she knows that any authority among them will be tenuous.
The blind internees’ decision to eat before burying the dead seems at once practical and sacrilegious, as though they’ve been reduced from humans with a sense of collective responsibility to mere animals more concerned about their own survival than the community they have formed in the hospital. In fact, the doctor’s wife says nothing because she recognizes how these animalistic impulses are starting to take over. The dead are nameless and faceless to them, and in fact, only the narrator truly understands their connections to the other characters. But the fact that these minor characters die so unceremoniously also forces the reader (who is unlikely to be particularly affected by their deaths) to confront the ways in which they’re similar to the soldiers who killed them and the internees who shrug the situation off.
Themes
After eating, the patients flatly refuse to bury the dead. At night, the doctor convinces two men from his ward to join him in burying half the corpses, and his wife secretly helps him select the bodies of the four men from their ward. Three more men join to help dig. Meanwhile, the daily announcements that play over the loudspeakers start to sound more sinister. After the doctor’s team finishes burying their dead, the other ward’s patients refuse to do their part but promise that they will do so tomorrow.
The doctor and his wife clearly see how the internees’ growing culture of selfishness threatens to create widespread disorder among all of them, and the doctor does his best to encourage the opposite outcome. Meanwhile, the Government’s announcements now sound sinister because the internees realize that they are an attempt to cover up the Government’s fear and confusion. The leadership is clearly willing to use power arbitrarily for whatever purposes it deems necessary, without taking the internees’ humanity or wellbeing into account.
Themes
On his way back to his ward, the doctor goes to the bathroom, where he steps on feces left by someone who missed the toilet. He wonders what the place looks like; there is no toilet paper. Disgusted, the doctor starts to cry. He finds the door and makes his way out, but he feels that he is dirty and “becoming an animal.” Back in the ward, his wife helps him clean up while everyone else sleeps. She wonders when she will go blind and why she has been spared so far. She and the doctor hear moaning and labored breathing across the ward, and someone calls the couple making these noises “pigs.”
In this passage, various characters compare themselves and one another to animals, which points to the way all of them have essentially started thinking selfishly rather than socially. The disgusting state of the bathrooms is another sign that the hospital’s fragile social order is on the brink of collapse—or has already collapsed—and the internees must dramatically lower their expectations for themselves and one another.
Themes
