Blindness+Skoza

=Saramago's __Blindness__=



José Saramago was born in 1922 in Portugal and is a Nobel Prize winning novelist. Saramago published Blindness in Portuguese in 1995. In most of his writing he uses unimaginable events to reveal elements of the human character. He is known for using a particular writing style that disregards conversational quotation marks and uses very long sentences and paragraphs.
 * Author Background**

This book is set in an unnamed city of an unknown time period, involving unnamed characters. When an epidemic of blindness suddenly arrives, the government takes quick action by quarantining the infected and those exposed to them. The story follows the inhabitants of one of these quarantines in the wards of a hospital as they develop a new society that is completely controlled by their inhibiting blindness. One character in particular is crucial in relaying the world of the blind to the reader; the lone woman who still has sight. She goes through the most hardships of any character in the book, as she is the only one who witnesses the many horrors of a blind society. She is her group's only hope, but she must overcome the psychological tests this responsibility has given her.
 * Plot Summary**

None of the characters are given proper names. They are each carefully described and without a title the reader can in fact learn a lot more about them.
 * Main Characters**
 * The doctor: This doctor is ironically an eye doctor and one of the first main characters to become blind in the beginning of the book, after he examines the first blind man. In the quarantine the doctor is an exceptional leader.
 * The doctor's wife: The doctor's wife is the only person known of that isn't affected by the blindness. At first she keeps her ability to see a secret until the times comes that her sight is crucial to her group's survival. The book is told indirectly through her perspective.
 * The first blind man: The first blind man is the first person we learn about falling victim to the blindness, and causes the doctor to go blind as well after an examination.
 * The blind man's wife: Title pretty self-explanatory. Her character is not speculated on much.
 * The girl with the dark glasses: The girl with the dark glasses is a young, single woman who has a reputation of sharing her sexuality with others. She wears dark sunglasses because before the epidemic of blindness, she had an eye infection that required her to use medicated drops and wear dark glasses. She wears them still for security. This young woman appoints herself responsible for the little boy with the squint who was seperated from his mother.
 * The boy with the squint: After suffering from the loss of his mother, this young boy, who has a squint in one eye, is very dependent upon the girl with dark glasses. His character is not speculated on much.
 * The man with the eye patch: The man with the eye patch is an older man. He comes into the quarantine with a radio that he uses to listen to news until there is no more news to be heard. He forms an interestingly sincere relationship with the girl with dark glasses.


 * Summary of important ideas/symbolism/themes**
 * Animalization: Upon losing their sight, the inhabitants of the hospital ward quarantines have to sacrifice qualities of civilized human beings. Since they lack the sense of sight now they have to use their senses of touch, smell, and hearing to function. This reduces them to crawling on all fours, aimlessly feeling around, and becoming extremely dirty within their very unsanitary surroundings. They become very violent, and greedy when it comes to food rations.
 * Society structure, social order: Each ward in the hospital quarantine ends up selecting a leader. The doctor showed exceptional leadership skills and guided and reassured his ward with confidence, with his wife always by his side helping him. The enemy ward to theirs was lead by a man with a gun, the man with ultimate power. This man's leadership resembled tyranny. His ward was very organized and took control of the food rations because he had so much power to use against others. Upon the escape from the wards, people were pretty much on their own unless they were in a group. If a person were to survive they had to stick with a group. These groups always stayed together and were completely dependent on each other, and were always on the move to find food around the city.
 * Eating and excrementing: The act of eating and extrementing is portrayed as uncontrollably disgusting. This is a very dehumanizing theme throughout the book. All notions of cleanliness disappear as the blind can't control where and when they have to relieve themselves, and all self-control is gone when it comes to food. The blind do things that would be unimaginable before just so they won't starve.
 * Morals: Morality gets bumped further down when survival is on the line. On top of being blind, the quarantined inhabitants have to learn to forget how to live the way they used to when things were clean, easy, and simple. They have to learn how to choose what to give up in order to get what they need. This topic is illustrated particularly when the hospital ward led by the man with the gun takes control of the food supply, and demands unheard things from the other ward's women in return for a meal.
 * Justice: What is still just when survival becomes the most important thing? In the hospital ward quarantines, there is no possible method of punishment and the inhabitants are capable of anything is they can get away with it. Ultimately the doctor's wife is forced to take justice into her own hands and really become the only justice the people around her will have.
 * Character connection: Whether they realize it or not, most of the main characters in this novel have some kind of connection to each other that ties together their fates. Only the reader is aware of this though. Even though this may be a small idea among the many other themes in the book, it gives an appropriate feeling for a dystopia; that we are all connected, in this together, and will suffer the same fate.

Saramago uses a specific style of writing that works remarkably well with the content of his novel. His writing more closely resembles natural speech and the thinking process. At first his sentences and paragraphs all look like run-ons, but he is smart in the way he mimics actual conversation. He uses no quotations to denote that a character is speaking. His sentences are very long, as well as his paragraphs.
 * Literary Style**

Compared to other dystopic novels we have read in class, this dystopia does not need justification through a war or other extreme societal change. It's true that the epidemic of blindness causes extreme societal change, but it's rare that you read a dystopic novel that takes place in the moment of change. In Blindness we are familiar with the society before it becomes a dystopia, even though the location and time period are unspecified. The first thing about Blindness that kept my interest was Saramago's style of writing. The second was the fact that the change was unfolding as I read. Rather than constructing a new society, a dystopia, the current society is picked apart and doesn't fully have time to reconstruct before the epidemic left as quickly as it came. The reader never has a chance to see what a society of blind people would actually become. Saramago portrays it as something modern people couldn't comprehend or survive because of all the advances and luxuries innovation and technology have given us. We use are senses less and less each day and take them for granted, but when the sense of sight is taken away we really only become one of two things; dead or dehumanized. The loss of sight is the loss of a lifestyle, test of patience, and a constant obstacle. Those that don't perish in Blindness become something different entirely; "animalistic". Saramago portrays the loss of orderly conduct, cleanliness, and common societal morals as becoming less human and turning into a primitive, territorial, greedy animal. I think that Saramago thinks this is what people would become because their sense of control and security is lost. But I also think he has little faith in human adaptation and will power even though it seems like a long time since we've been tested to use these things. The only actual animal whose character is emphasized in Blindness is a stray dog who comes to follow around the doctor's wife's group after they've escaped the hospital wards and are wandering the city streets. This dog is portrayed as more noble than the humans, and is compared to the doctor's wife in that they can both see and are both helpful and heroic (Bolt 2009). The reader is tricked into having more respect for the animals in the story than the humans. constantly throughout the book, the blind people are referenced to as pigs, thieves, and twitching animals. In fact this may have began when the government of this unnamed city started quarantining the affected and exposed, because from the beginning the blind were segregated and treated as subhuman because of their disease. The ability to perform simple tasks is lost to blindness. This is controversial in the society of today's blind.
 * Analysis/evaluation**

Portraying blind people without understanding what it is actually like to be blind is similar to portraying a man when you are a woman, or an black person when you are a white person. Negative reactions to Blindness, specifically the film adaptation, included
 * Reactions**


 * References**

Bolt, David. "Saramago's Blindness: Humans or Animals?" __Explicator__ 66.1: 44-47. __Google Scholar__. Ed. Google. Google. 5 Mar. 2009

Cole, Kevin L. "Saramago's BLINDNESS." __Explicator__ 64.2 (2006): 119-121. __Google Scholar__. Ed. Google. Google. 5 Mar. 2009

Itszkoff, Dave. "'Blindness' Movie Stokes Protest." __New York TImes__ (Oct. 2008): 2. __EBSCO Host__. 20 Mar. 2009 .

Slater, Judith J. "Blindness, Worldlessnes, and Educational Practice." __Taboo__ 4.2 (2000): 75-93. __Google Scholar__. Ed. Google. Google. 5 Mar. 2009 .

Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. "The Excremental Gaze: Saramago's Blindness and the Disintegration of the Panoptic Vision." __Critique__ 45.3 (2004): 293-308. __EBSCO Host__. 20 Mar. 2009 .