The Literature Book

321

See also: The Divine Comedy 62–65 ■ The Canterbury Tales 68–71 ■ Don Quixote 76–81 ■ Candide 96–97 ■

Gulliver’s Travels 104 ■ Animal Farm 245 ■ Lord of the Flies 287

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

presence and is incurable. The

government transfers those

affected to a guarded asylum, and

leaves them to fend for themselves,

with food and cleaning equipment

as their only aids.

As a form of society, based on

solidarity, begins to emerge among

the blinded—fueled by need,

survival, and a return of human

empathy—we see the main

characters grow as members of a

community. Saramago describes

the physical and psychological

struggles of the newly blinded as

a parallel to people who have lost

sight of reason, humanity, and the

very idea of human society: “These

blind internees [...] will soon turn

into animals, worse still, into blind

animals.” The arrival of a group

of organized blind thugs becomes

an added element of oppression,

with obvious political connotations

of the violence and terror of a

totalitarian regime. Saramago

gives his narrative unstoppable

force by minimizing punctuation

and switching between tenses and

perspectives. This creates a sense

of being propelled through the

story, thus echoing the themes

of the narrative.

Blindness and insight

The reader is given an added

perspective on the bleak situation

through the eyes of the doctor’s

wife, one of the first internees,

but one who feigns blindness

to be with her husband. This

device allows for an enhanced

understanding of the bonds

being created, the habits being

abandoned, and the ideologies

being formed and re-formed in the

story. It is through the doctor’s wife

that the characters discover each

another, and find hope and the

strength to survive the white

blindness, the cruelty of the thugs,

and the harshness of the asylum.

It is thanks to her humanity and

her empathy—symbols of the

type of society toward which

people should be striving—that,

ultimately, they start to rebuild

a life outside the asylum. ■

José Saramago José de Sousa Saramago was^

born in Portugal in 1922, the

son of poor rural workers. His

parents could not afford to send

him to school, so he trained as a

mechanic; only later did his talent

for writing lead him into work

as a translator, journalist, and

editor. A politically engaged man,

Saramago found that his first

novel, Land of Sin (Terra do

Pecado, 1947), was not well

received by the conservative

Catholic regime of Estado Novo

(New State), which blocked the

book’s production. He resurfaced

in 1966 with Possible Poems

(O Poemas Possìveis) and, after

writing more novels, received

the Nobel Prize for literature

in 1998. He moved to Spain

following the Portuguese

government’s censorship of one

of his books in 1992. He lived

there until his death in 2010.

Other key works

1982 Baltasar and Blimunda

1984 The Year of the Death

of Ricardo Reis

1991 The Gospel According

to Jesus Christ

2004 Seeing

Portugal’s repressive Estado Novo

regime is an unspoken presence in

Saramago’s text; the book’s title and

contents gesture to a parallel theme of

a dark and sinister political blindness.

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