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Chapter 7
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 new arrivals bring “two advantages”: first, with the hospital full, people can “establish and maintain stable and lasting relations” with one another. Second, with more people, food rations are more regularly provided and more equally shared. All in all, despite everyone’s continued “misfortunes,” things have noticeably improved. The second ward finally buries its dead, and the first ward, with guidance from the doctor’s wife, remains clean and civil.
Just as quickly as the narrative descended into the horrors experienced by the latest group of internees to enter the hospital, it now shifts back to the positivity that always coexists with evil and suffering. Notably, all of the improvements that the narrator cites have to do with the hospital’s changing social organization: namely, people invest in their relationships, which they see as meaningful because they are “stable and lasting,” and people no longer fight over resources. In a sense, even after all hope of establishing a collective seems to have been lost, now the internees are establishing various smaller-scale networks, even if there is no centralized or universally-recognized power.
Themes
The first ward also welcomes the man with the eye patch, who takes over the car-thief’s bed. The doctor’s wife tells the doctor that this newcomer was one of his patients, so the doctor goes over, pretends to discover the man’s eye patch, and reintroduces himself. They joke that, fortunately, the old man no longer needs surgery.
With his wife’s invaluable but invisible help, the doctor maintains his moral and social authority in the ward. His jovial banter with the old man reveals that things truly are looking better and illustrates how people retain their humanity and capacity for good—like their ability to use humor as a survival mechanism—even amid adversity.
Themes
The old man with the eye patch reveals that the city is in a state of “panic” because of the blindness epidemic. All the other ward members who were in the doctor’s office also introduce themselves to him, and then the doctor pulls out a radio, which will allow them to follow the news (although the girl with the glasses wants to listen to music). To the doctor’s wife’s delight, they tune into a station that announces the time: four o’clock. As the ward’s patients crowd around, the man with the eye patch starts recounting everything that has happened since the white blindness began spreading. At first, there were hundreds of cases and everyone was frightened, but after a day, the Government claimed to have everything “under control.”
The old man’s late entry into the hospital and preexisting relationship with the doctor allow him to serve as a link between the outside world and the quarantine zone. Indeed, the doctor’s wife resetting her watch symbolizes the way that this link gives the internees a sense of meaning or purpose and reminds them of their former lives that they hope to rediscover. Saramago’s readers already know not to trust the Government when it says that things are “under control”—outside the hospital’s gates, as well as inside, the Government has put its self-preservation first and is primarily interested in maintaining its power by any means necessary.
Themes
From this point, the narrator includes “a reorganized version” of the man with the eyepatch’s original story, which lacks credibility. After the initial outbreak, the Government announced that the blindness was temporary, just an unfortunate coincidence, and the public even thought that the blind would recuperate their vision. The Government held medical conferences in an attempt to find a solution, but the attendees went blind as well. Soon, there were too many blind people to quarantine, but they also could not be asked to quarantine themselves at home. People suddenly went blind while walking down the street, and entire families went blind together and became unable to care for themselves. Anyone who helped care for the blind went blind, too. Bus drivers and commercial pilots went blind on the job, causing horrific accidents, and transportation fell into chaos: the city is now full of abandoned cars, which turned into obstacles for the blind people roaming the streets.
The narrator’s bold and symbolic decision to “reorganize” the blind man’s story allows Saramago to mock the Government, whose formal-sounding language is used to create an illusion of objectivity and absolute truth. In fact, Saramago would surely want his readers to be more suspicious and skeptical of official-sounding narratives. Clearly, the Government’s repeated failures to control the situation show that its seemingly-objective narratives not only cannot be trusted, but moreover are designed in order to consolidate its power and advance its specific political ends. On another note, the blindness epidemic has revealed the extent to which modern technology and complex social organization makes people dependent upon one another—and specifically reliant on sight. Technology is entirely built around the fragile evolutionary development of human sight, a sensory system so complex that people often forget it is still a product of nature.
Themes
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The old man concludes his story and briefly chats about his eyepatch with the doctor. Then, the old man proposes they play a game “to pass the time”: each patient should share what they saw just as they went blind. The old man remembers examining his “blind eye” when he lost sight in the other one. The doctor explains that he was seeing his ophthalmology books, and the doctor’s wife says that she was in the ambulance. Finally, an unidentified man says that he was looking at a painting in the museum; his description of this piece is so complicated that it seems to be a number of different paintings all jumbled together. Meanwhile, someone repeatedly but unsuccessfully guesses the painter’s nationality. The girl with the glasses comments that everyone went blind because of fear, and the news announces “the formation of a government of unity and national salvation.”
Although the old man has just shocked the other internees—and likely the reader—with his account of what’s happened since the epidemic started, he keeps his composure and quickly returns to the hopeful, positive side of things. This, in turn, helps the other internees remain calm. In fact, his storytelling game offers a rare moment of collective reflection for the internees, who get a chance to share their individual experiences in a way that they have generally been denied throughout their time in quarantine. Whereas the soldiers’ narratives about these internees have dehumanized and degraded them, when they are given the chance to narrate their own experiences, the internees reclaim their humanity. Indeed, this plays out on a smaller scale within the conversation: the person who keeps guessing the painter’s nationality is trying and failing to hijack the speaker’s story. Although the things that this speaker remembers seeing clearly could not all coexist in the same painting, his point is not to accurately describe what he saw, but rather to claim his individual narrative—his voice. Meanwhile, the Government’s promise seems both empty and foreboding: while “unity and national salvation” are needed, everybody in the book seems to understand that the existing state cannot provide it.
Themes
