Blindness

José Saramago's Blindness begins with a man going blind at a traffic light. The blindness is not darkness — it is a sea of white, a luminous blankness. Within days, the epidemic spreads. An ophthalmologist goes blind. His patients go blind. Anyone who comes into contact with the afflicted goes blind. The government, panicking, quarantines the first victims in an abandoned mental asylum. One woman — the doctor's wife — can still see but pretends she cannot, in order to accompany her husband into internment.

What follows is one of the most disturbing novels of the twentieth century. Inside the asylum, society collapses in accelerated time. A group of thugs seizes control of the food supply and demands valuables, then women, in exchange for rations. Hygiene disintegrates. Cruelty becomes casual. The doctor's wife, the only witness to all of it, must decide what she is willing to do to protect the people she loves.

Saramago's prose mirrors the disorientation of the epidemic. There are no character names — only descriptions: the doctor, the girl with dark glasses, the boy with the squint. Dialogue is not separated by quotation marks; it flows into the narration like a stream. Sentences run on, sometimes for entire pages. The effect is suffocating and deliberate — you feel the blindness pressing in on you.

Blindness is an allegory, but it never feels merely allegorical. The physical details — the filth, the hunger, the violence — are rendered with such unflinching specificity that the horror is concrete, not abstract. Saramago strips civilization to its foundations and forces you to look at what remains.

Blindness earns its place because it asks the question that most novels are afraid to touch: What holds civilization together, and how quickly would it fall apart if one fundamental assumption changed? Saramago's answer is terrifying. Deprive people of sight, and within weeks you get tyranny, sexual violence, and the total collapse of human dignity. The speed of the disintegration is the novel's most disturbing argument — it suggests that the veneer of civilization is far thinner than we want to believe.

But the novel is not nihilistic. The doctor's wife — the only character who can see the horror clearly — becomes an extraordinary figure of moral courage. She does not lose her humanity. She acts, she protects, she carries others when they cannot carry themselves. Her persistence is not heroic in any grand sense — it is the basic, stubborn refusal to let the worst in humanity become the only thing that survives.

Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, and Blindness was cited as a central work in his achievement. The novel endures because its allegory is infinitely adaptable. Every crisis — pandemic, political collapse, climate disaster — activates its warning. It is a novel you hope you never need to understand, and one you cannot forget once you have read it.

Published in Portuguese in 1995 and in English in 1997, Blindness was central to José Saramago's Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and adapted into a 2008 film directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. A sequel, Seeing, was published in 2004. During the COVID-19 pandemic, sales of the novel surged worldwide as readers turned to it for its uncomfortably prescient depiction of society under epidemic conditions. Saramago's distinctive prose style — long sentences without conventional punctuation — has influenced writers across multiple languages and established a new model for how literary fiction could represent collective crisis.