102 pages • 3 hours read
José SaramagoBlindness
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The first chapter of Blindness opens in the middle of a traffic jam in an unnamed city. When the traffic light turns green, one car seems to stall out in the intersection. As other drivers get out of their cars to push the stalled vehicle to the side of the road, they realize there is nothing wrong with the car itself: The driver—who Saramago refers to as “the first blind man” throughout the rest of the novel—has gone suddenly blind. The crowd tries to reassure the first blind man, who pleads with them to take him home. One man in the crowd volunteers to drive the blind man to his apartment, and the blind man accepts the help gratefully.
As the Good Samaritan drives the man home, it becomes clear that the first blind man’s sudden condition has made the world a foreign place. A “sense of panic welled up inside him” (4), and simple acts like getting out of his car unassisted leave him crying for help. The Good Samaritan helps the blind man to his door and offers to stay with him until the blind man’s wife gets home from work. The blind man unlocks his door by feeling the serrated edge of each key on his key ring. The Samaritan offers to stay with the first blind man until his wife comes home, but the blind man worries that the Samaritan will attack him and rob him at the first opportunity. The blind man thanks him for his help but declines his company, then locks himself into his apartment to wait for his wife.
Now safe and at least moderately secure, the blind man takes stock of his condition. Instead of seeing nothing but black, “an impenetrable whiteness covered everything” (5). He tries to move around his apartment by touch, but even the objects he has seen day in and day out are now alien. As he tries to reach his sitting room, he accidentally knocks over a vase of flowers. He crouches down to clean up the mess, but ends up getting a splinter of glass in his finger instead. Crying in a mix of frustration and fear, the man finally makes it to the sofa where he can remove the glass splinter. Exhausted from his ordeal, the blind man falls asleep and dreams that he is only pretending to be blind.
Unfortunately, that is not the case: When his wife gets home and wakes him up, he tells her what happened. She responds with a mix of compassion, confusion, and fear. She immediately calls an eye specialist, who agrees to see her husband right away. There is one problem, however: The wife realizes that the Samaritan who helped her husband home has also stolen their car. Despite that setback, the wife and the blind man make it to the eye specialist’s office, who sees them right away despite having a full waiting room. Everyone around the blind man—those who help him out of his car, the Samaritan, his wife, and even the other patients—try to reassure the man in some way. Some tell him that his condition came on so quickly that it must be treatable. Others posit that he is stressed, while other people skip the reassurances and instead try to console him, reminding him that “today it’s you” (5), but tomorrow it might be someone else.
Once he makes it back to the doctor’s office, the doctor gives the blind man a thorough examination. The doctor is stumped: Not only does the first blind man have no history of eye issues, the doctor can find no physiological reason for his blindness. He tells the blind man, “[I]f, in fact, you are blind, your blindness at this moment defies explanation” (14). The doctor cannot treat the blind man without a diagnosis, so he sends him home with instructions to have more tests done and to return once he has the results.
Chapter 2 Summary
Chapter 2 switches focus from the blind man to the Samaritan who helped him, who Saramago now refers to as “the thief” (18). The thief has stolen the blind man’s car not out of some “evil intention,” but because the opportunity presented itself, not unlike buying “a lottery ticket on catching the sight of a ticket-vendor” (16). In short, the thief saw an opportunity and took it.
In this moment, readers also encounter the novel’s unnamed narrator, who refers to themselves using plural, first-person pronouns (like “we,” “our,” and “us”). The narrator only enters the narrative of Blindness sporadically—in this case, it is to tell readers that morality is not a construct but something that has “always existed” (17), which is why the thief cannot escape his own conscience. As the thief drives away, he finds himself increasingly tense for two reasons. First, he worries that he will get caught by the police and sent to jail because of his thievery. Second, he worries that he will also go blind, because there is no way to know whether the condition is communicable like a disease or just a cruel twist of fate. Unable to bear the tension any longer, the thief pulls over and abandons the car. As he walks away, the thief goes blind.
The section then switches back to the eye specialist from the previous chapter. He has seen his last patient for the day, but he returns to the case of the blind man. He calls one of his colleagues to discuss the case and bounce around ideas, then decides that he will go home to consult his medical literature. At the moment, he is considering two possible diagnoses. One is “agnosia,” which is a type of “psychic” blindness where the patient’s eyes still function, but their brain is no longer able to process images (20). The second potential diagnosis is a type of “amaurosis,” which is when a person’s vision is plunged into total darkness. In this case, the doctor hypothesizes that his patient might have a “white amaurosis,” because the blind man described his vision as “if he had plunged with open eyes into a milky sea” (21). The doctor goes home and has dinner with his wife before consulting his books. He ultimately determines that neither diagnosis is correct before going blind himself.
The narrative then shifts to follow a prostitute, who Saramago calls “the girl with the glasses,” who has visited a doctor for eyedrops to treat an eye infection. She leaves his clinic, picks up her prescription, then takes a taxi to her next client appointment at a hotel. She meets with her client, and after sex, the girl also wakes up blind
Chapter 3 Summary
This section opens once again with the thief, who has been picked up by a police officer and escorted home. The thief’s wife opens the door and initially worries that her husband has been caught again, followed quickly by relief that there are no stolen goods in the home. The police officer explains that her husband has gone blind, then turns the thief over to her care. The story then returns to the girl, who upon realizing her blindness, starts screaming. Her client promptly flees, and the girl is quickly evicted by the hotel staff. She suspects her blindness is punishment for “her disreputable conduct, [and] for her immorality,” and the police end up taking her to her parents’ house (27).
The story switches once again to the doctor, who has lain awake all night thinking about his situation. Even though he is anxious, he still has a job to do as an ophthalmologist, especially because he suspects the blindness is a highly contagious disease that strikes without symptoms. When he wakes up in the morning, he confesses his condition to his wife, whom he realizes he has exposed to the illness. She calms him down and pledges to help him however she can. He realizes he must call the Ministry and report what he knows, especially because he suspects the outbreak of an epidemic.
His initial phone calls are unsuccessful, especially because he is unwilling to tell low-level government officials about his suspicions lest he start a panic. He then gets in touch with the director of the hospital. The doctor shares his suspicions, and the director initially brushes him off, arguing that “it is still too early to draw any conclusions, two isolated cases have no statistical relevance” (33). Soon, however, the director calls back and is much more serious. He tells the doctor that one of his patients from the previous day—a young boy with a squint—has come to the hospital reporting blindness.
Within a few hours, the doctor is contacted by the Ministry. A Minister thanks him for his “zeal,” then tells him that two other cases have been reported. The government wants access to all the doctor’s files, to which he agrees—even though he is ordered to stay at home (35). At six o’clock that evening, the doctor receives one last call: The government is sending over an ambulance to take him to the hospital. His wife begins packing a hospital bag for him and (unbeknownst to the doctor) another for herself. When the ambulance arrives to take the doctor away, his wife informs them that she has “gone blind this very minute” (36).
Chapter 4 Summary
The Minister decides to indefinitely quarantine those affected with “the white sickness,” as the disease had come to be called, in order to try and control the epidemic (42). After a brief discussion with the President of the Commission of Logistics and Security, he decides the best place for this is a long-empty mental hospital. The two decide that one wing will house the blind, while a separate wing will house those exposed to the disease. Should someone exposed become blind as well, they will transfer over to the blind wing. They also decide that those who have been interred must run the system internally, because no healthy person would volunteer to expose themselves to the white evil. To try and keep the quarantined on the same page, they will play an announcement over the hospital’s PA system that explains the facilities’ rules. The quarantined will be responsible for taking care of themselves and will receive no outside assistance other than a twice daily food delivery. In other words, the quarantined are completely on their own.
With the decisions in place, the government moves quickly and rounds up both the affected and the exposed. The doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with the glasses, the first blind man, the boy with the squint, and the thief find themselves together in one ward of the mental hospital. The doctor’s wife, who still has her sight, can make a quick survey of the place and finds that it is in poor condition. When her husband realizes she still has her sight, he insists that she leave, but she argues that the soldiers guarding the facility—whose job it is to kill would-be escapees on sight—would not let her “get as far as the stairs” (40). Instead, she asks her husband to keep her sight a secret so she can help the blind for as long as she can.
The rest of this chapter details the interactions of the group of blind people as they struggle to make sense of their situation and of each other. The group introduces themselves and tries to figure out how their cases are related. The thief initially tries to remain silent, but soon the blind man realizes who he is. The two begin arguing. The blind man outs the thief for who he is, but the thief responds, “[Y]ou stole my eyesight, so who’s the bigger thief” (48). The altercation soon becomes physical, and the doctor and the doctor’s wife must physically separate the two.
With the tension in the room simmering, the boy announces he needs to use the restroom. They form a line as the doctor’s wife, who is still pretending to be blind, leads them toward the lavatory. The thief has found himself behind the girl, and he takes the opportunity to grope her. In response, she drives the sharp heel of her shoe through the thief’s thigh. The thief curses the girl and denies any wrongdoing, but the girl tells everyone he tried to assault her. In the meantime, the doctor’s wife realizes the thief’s wound is serious and needs attention. She and the doctor help the thief to the kitchen, where she cleans the wound and binds it with the thief’s vest. The doctor’s wife has pretended to be blind throughout the day, but she drops the pretense to handle the crisis, and the thief vaguely registers her actions are “unusual” (52).
With that situation resolved, they return to the group to lead them to the bathroom. The doctor’s wife realizes the boy has wet himself, but she cannot mention it without giving her secret away. Instead, she leads everyone to the lavatories and then back to the ward, where they choose assigned beds and go to sleep. The chapter ends with the girl putting antibiotic eyedrops into her eyes to treat her eye infection despite her blindness.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
For most readers, the structure and writing style of Blindness is a difficult one. Not only are the sentences long and full of commas, the dialogue is not broken out into its own paragraphs. Additionally, the characters lack names and instead are referred to by general terms—like “the first blind man” and “the thief”—which can make the novel difficult to read. However, Saramago’s stylistic and structural choices are important to understanding the novel itself: They contribute to the novel’s tone and the universality of its themes. Taking a closer look at how these elements function gives readers the tools they need to unlock the rest of the text.
One major element that bears closer scrutiny is Saramago’s writing style. Saramago eschews typical punctuation marks like periods, colons, and quotation marks and uses commas instead. To illustrate this, consider this sentence from Chapter 4 where the doctor’s wife keeps her knowledge of the boy’s accident to herself: “There’s a smell of urine here, and his wife felt she should confirm his impression, Yes, there is a smell, she could not say that it was coming from the lavatories because they were still some distance away, and, being obligated to behave as if she were blind, she could not reveal that the stench was coming from the boy’s wet trousers” (52). This sentence contains two pieces of dialogue—the doctor’s question and his wife’s response—which writers would normally indicate with quotation marks and fresh paragraphs. In this case, Saramago chooses to integrate the conversation not only within a single sentence, but as part as one singular paragraph as well. The only clue readers have that a new piece of dialogue has started is capitalization, which in this quote is indicated by the capitalized “Yes.” Additionally, Saramago uses commas to combine complete sentences, which create sweeping pieces of text where ideas, plot elements, and characters seem to flow (or perhaps bump) into one another.
These stylistic choices do two things. First, it firmly places this book within the postmodernism movement. Postmodernism as a literary movement is characterized by its desire to destabilize both convention and the reader. Postmodernists challenge traditional writing structures by creating fragmented plots, subverting typical language structures, embracing paradox, and deliberately obfuscating textual meaning. Given this definition, it is easy to see how Saramago’s writing style is postmodern. For example, consider this sentence from the first chapter: “The doctor asked him, Has anything like this ever happened to you before, or something similar, No, doctor, I don’t even use glasses” (13). Not only does Saramago reject typical grammar conventions, he also rejects typical writing structures. He does not separate the dialogue from context using paragraph breaks, nor does he add dialogue tags to help the reader follow the conversation. Saramago effectively takes all the tools readers have learned to help them parse and understand a text and throws them away. The reader is left to fumble their way through the narrative and figure out its meaning. In that way, Saramago’s style forces readers to stumble and adapt in order to understand the novel, just like the blind must do throughout the novel.
Second, Saramago writes in a stream-of-consciousness form to create a hectic, confused tone. In The Principles of Psychology, psychologist William James describes stream of consciousness as “a ‘river’ or a ‘stream’” of metaphors, images, and concepts that flow together in a chain of uninterrupted thought. In Blindness, Saramago’s use of a stream of consciousness style makes words bump and crawl over one another, not unlike the newly blind people in the novel. More importantly, it creates a tone of confusion and fear. The narrative rushes forward as if it is trying to escape, and the jumble of dialogue, description, and narrative mimic the panic felt by the characters as their situations continue to worsen. Thus, Saramago’s stylistic decisions are critical to creating and maintaining the tension that permeates the novel.
Another major element worth discussing are the characters themselves. None of the characters have names other than their professions, appearance, or relationships to one another. The doctor’s wife remarks on this once she and her husband enter quarantine. As more infected people join their ward, she notes they “didn’t give [their] name[s]” because they also understand “names are of no importance here” (59). In the first section of the novel, the namelessness of the characters reiterates the way that becoming blind relegates people to a lower echelon of society. They are not just “less” because of their disability—they pose a threat to the able-bodied. As a result, they are interned like animals and progressively stripped of their humanity. The first thing they lose are their names, but that is merely the first step in what will become a slew of dehumanizing injustices. The namelessness of the characters has the added effect of transforming the characters into universalized—and perhaps even allegorical—figures. Readers can more easily put themselves into the narrative, and they can also translate its themes to different times and places.
Finally, the first section of the novel introduces readers to the work’s narrators. There are two—the first is an unnamed, third-person narrator who focuses on the characters in the asylum in a limited perspective. This narrator gives readers an in-depth understanding of the novel’s central characters, but they cannot give the reader context for what is happening beyond the asylum’s walls. That job falls to the novel’s second narrator. Readers can distinguish these voices because the second narrator injects themselves into the narrative by using plural pronouns like “we” and “our.” (It is worth noting here that the distinction between the two voices happens in Chapter 8. For more clarity on this, see the “Important Quotations” section.) This narrator first appears in Chapter 2, saying, “With the passing of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of blood and in the salt of tears, and, as if that were not enough, we made our eyes into a kind of mirror turned inwards, with the rest that they often show without reserve what we are verbally trying to deny” (17). This narrator does two things that the first narrator cannot. First, they are omniscient: They provide the readers with outside information, including updates about widespread social collapse. Second, this narrator contextualizes the novel for the reader. For instance, in the section above, the narrator tells readers that blindness has allowed the thief to reflect on his actions, leading to a minor crisis of conscience. Consequently, the use of such a murky, dual-narrator model further serves to destabilize the narrative, forcing readers to piece the story together from several perspectives.
While understanding the purposes behind Saramago’s structural choices does not necessarily make Blindness easier to read, it does equip readers with a new set of tools to decipher the novel’s meaning.
Related Titles
By José Saramago
