In Saramago's literary novel,“white blindness” strikes a man while he was driving. After he has gone to a clinic to check on his condition and the doctor couldn't find the problem, the disease spreads to the doctor and his patients. To contain the blindness, the government rounds up these victims in a mental asylum where the strong would oppress the weak.
The eye doctor’s wife, who keeps her eyesight after everyone have gone blind, leads a group of six people, including her husband, on a journey in the wasteland of the blind that reeked of excrement and decomposing corpses, to search for food.
To what depth would men and women descend to fill their bellies, to satiate that hunger which would smother all traces of humanity?
Blindness is a surrealist novel of the human condition, the struggle to survive that would release the cruelty and selfishness suppressed by law and punishment as well as the courage and perseverance in the face of suffering. It is the stench throughout the novel that would linger in the reader’s mind.
Albert Camus has The Plague; William Golding The Lord of the Flies; Cormac McCarthy The Road; and so Jose Saramago Blindness.
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