. Spinning .

Somehow I doubt that this is the entire message of the book–Saramago must be above cliche'. But this is about how the narrative ends; one by one they regain their sight, the world will recover and go on.  Did the people learn anything? Was this a punishment from God? How long did the white blindness last and what made it go away? Why didn't the doctor's wife ever go blind? Why didn't anyone try to figure that out?

In other words, the book somehow left me unsatisfied.

The story may have already been made into a movie, and this is what I think it is more suited to be; a horror movie that contains the arc, the main characters, the conflicts, the resolution (or not, if you're looking for a more literary context), the blood, guts, bad government, man willing to do almost anything for survival, etc. The writing was good, but in my mind not great; though I could say that perhaps it loses something in the translation.

All in all, an okay book.

There is an interesting passage about the ability to continue writing while blind. The group has stopped at the first blind man's home to find a writer living there with his family–the blind are moving around like gypsies drawn by food and shelter and settle in where they can, the writer's family having had their own home taken over while they were away. The interesting part is both the physical adaptation and the mental need to write. Here, the writer starts the conversation with the first blind man (Note that capitalization indicates change of character speaking):

Saramago is telling us that a writer bases story on reality, experienced directly or indirectly through conversation, and allows his own imagination to elaborate or fill in to create a narrative. The writer in this story then goes on to explain how he is able to write even though he is blind:

Of course! Though we may seem out of touch with our keyboards where our fingers know the letters and there is no need to oversee them with our eyes, an old typewriter or paper and pen serve well in the case of disaster.

There may be a thought here to the spirit that survives, not only in the desire of the writer to continue on as before, but in the desire of all men to seek a means of continuing on with what they know, what they can do. This appears to be the second move towards a future; the first being the cleaning of clothes and bodies soiled by time spent in the concern of just survival.

After (I don't know) days of living confined to the institution, a purposely-set fire kills some inmates but the others must somehow escape or burn to death and it is at this point where the doctor's wife tells the others that she can see as she attempts to lead them out to safety. The soldiers are gone, the gate is open, they are finally free. Saramago's prose hasn't exactly set me afire, but there are some nice words here:

We've all had that feeling of being in a strange place, the image comes to mind of getting off a plane in a country you've never been to before. Or hiking up a hill and arriving at the crest to find miles of open horizon to view. The boundaries of a confined but known arena often offer more freedom than the open expanse of the unknown.

Boundaries then, are made in the mind as well and are as restrictive as a wooden fence or barbed wire strung out along a defined space. The individual will each have his own response based on likes and dislikes, comfort zones, spirit of adventure, city versus country preferences, etc. In Saramago's world of blindness however, I doubt any reader could fail to understand the fear of the openness outside the gates.

As with all apocalyptic or disaster stories the characters face obstacles that force them to face themselves first. The name of the game is always survival. The ethics involve personal versus community, wrong versus right considering circumstances (something that ethics claims should not be in play), sick versus healthy, children first, strong versus weak, and basically, just how far a character will go to survive (the literary "getting what one wants desperately").

In this novel, there are a series of conflicts and resolutions. With the drama focusing on blindness, we would consider that to be the cause, the reactive behavior following to be the effect. We no longer care–nor do the victims–what caused the blindness. In place of a fight or flight instinct (that may be a parallel story happening outside the walls of the mental institution storyworld) there is a fight or accept situation being asked daily. Food, leadership, sex; these are the main needs of the people and how they must act upon these needs is the question.

When a single group seeks control over the masses, the blindness, likely because they have not gotten used to it quite yet, is what stands as an obstacle between the moral and the immoral behaviors of both the bad guys and the good guys. The good guys are willing to sacrifice their valuables and then their women (this from almost all the guys and all the women) in order to eat since the bad guys have all the food and a gun. Life is still too precious to risk despite the filth and degradation the victims of first blindness, then incarcerations, now the bullying tactics of a clearly immoral group (NOTE: I question how'd these 20 blind men find each other and end up all in the same ward? Is it another case of mob mentality, or what is best for the group?).

When one crosses the line of accepted behavior, societal or personal, is it justified as a one-time deal? Is the future (survival) even considered or is the present the important impetus? What of the past, the deeds done that one would never have considered without the pressure of the situation–does one return to one's moral stance or has the line hardened to prevent return…

One cannot read this story without questioning one's own judgments in trying to imagine what one would do in similar circumstances–an easy armchair choice when it's not real.

Cormac McCarthy does that; just when you round a bend you see a tree that looks a little odd…

What Saramago does however is to get the reader riled up on his own and then calm him down. I have found that some of the things that have me making faces in disbelief–like after the previous posting's scenario and when the doctor's wife is so damned understanding she helps her husband back to his own bed–are dealt with in a finer depth a page or two later.

In this instance, as the doctor's wife gently consoles the girl with dark glasses and shares her secret of her vision, there is an empathy between the women and yet I wonder if on some dark level in the doctor's wife she isn't saying "Ha! I watched the whole thing, bitch!"

I think Saramago likes to play with human nature and push people to a point where not only his characters but the readers go through some mental adjustments.

With a small group of men–all from one ward–taking over the distribution of food and demanding payment of all valuables (and, they have a gun), there naturally comes about a societal structure different from the outside world as well as different from what little had been established within the wards.

But the valuables have run out. So the thugs are asking for women.

Saramago gives us no intimate reaction to this, just reports the discussion as the battle of the sexes comes into play and how much male ego can stand, feminine proprieties are offended, and the overwhelming dedication to survival and the cause.  All understandable, and Saramago sort of loses me on the thin line of sociology as it is a rather cold display of what I would assume to be a more dramactic situation, but this sort of got to me more, the doctor's wife once more awake while others in the ward are (supposedly) asleep:

There has been some kind of arrangement made that certain wards will serve their women up first. There has also been some kind of agreement that the men in the wards that send out the women will be taken care of first rather than all the women going off to serve the one horny ward. And, of course, there have been some folks that have coupled out of need for comfort.

But the doctor? I don't know exactly how long these people have been sequestered together, whether a matter of days, weeks, or months, but why is the doctor racing over to "the girl with dark glasses" when he has a truly terrific and loving wife by his side? He knows she can see. He must have known she wasn't beside him in bed when he got up. What the hell's wrong with him? Yes, he knows that his wife will eventually be going off to service one of the thugs, but he claimed that even though his ego was damaged, he understood the necessity.

I don't know. When even the good go bad, and frankly, I don't see why they've let it get to this point, I wonder if Saramago's message on human nature is more negative than reality.

Maybe it's just because I'm in a pissy mood, but I'm not buying this story.

For one thing, Saramago is rather particular about numbers and distances and yet I can't quite grasp how two wings of three wards each, each holding maybe twenty people or so comes out to three hundred people.

Or, the fact that when the last large load of a couple hundred people were moved in, the not-yet blind were of course prevailed upon to give up space and yet we don't really have any but the doctor's wife and possibly a gunman who still can see.

Or the mixup in food distribution, the lack of any medical supplies given to the people, the too-soon attitude of the outside world to have given up on the afflicted, the seeming lack of affiliation as new people are brought in—knowing full well that it appears to spread by some form of contagion, the willingness to give all valuables to one man with a gun when by sound alone they could have overcome him, the lack of the doctor's attempt to find out why his wife can still see, the layout of the courtyard where it seemed to be enclosed by the wings and yet the doctor's wife is out there one night and sees the soldiers at the gate (this I could well be misreading), and a few other things that generally do not quite add up to a picture that is well-painted by the author.

There is also no real interaction between the characters, and this, with Saramago's choice to not quote dialogue takes one out of the story, much like watching a play. There may be a good reason for all this in the scheme of things, as Saramago would be hard pressed to quote dialogue when the characters remain nameless but are referred to instead by "the first blind man," "the doctor's wife," "the man with the black eye patch," etc.

There is, of course, as with all stories about epidemics or devastation of some sort, the ethical and moral questions that come up when man's nature is questioned in a survival situation. From the very beginning of the book when the thief kindly drove the blind man home and then stole his car we saw the inherent evil that comes with opportunity. Saramago takes this further; he gives us pause to consider the spiritual and the concept of punishment:

The soldiers have delivered food and left it in the hallway, halfway between the two wards holding the afflicted and the possibly contaminated and the above scenario is one where the seeing folk are considering taking the food after some of the blind (who according to the rules were to be fed first) have been shot when the soldiers felt threatened.

But these people are hungry and in their minds, survival fights ethics. What I wonder about, however, is that the contaminated are seemingly unconcerned that their particular loved one (the reason they themselves were confined in quarantine) may be in the pile of bodies and blood.

Very odd, when you think about it, that we even use such a term and seek it in the fiction we read. Fiction, after all, should allow for anything the imagination can dream up.

In setting up a storyworld, however, the author must be wary of letting in something that seems out of place within whatever bounds his world. For that one little detail will halt the reader, bring him up short with an incredulous look on his face. He will accept the Silverback Gorilla that wears suits and speaks with a French accent, but he will frown at the thought of him drinking a highball when clearly a Beaujolais would be in character.

I've gotten an itchy feeling with Blindness, when the afflicted–six to start (though one is faking)–are gathered and dropped off at an unused mental hospital in wards. While I accept the need for confinement and keeping them away from the populace until the it's discovered what causes the blindness and if it is indeed contagious, I don't accept the conditions as outlined in the book. They are given no medical help or supplies and a list of rules are blared at them over a loudspeaker. One of the instructions is that "second, leaving the building without authorization will mean instant death"'; another, "twelfth, in the case of death, whatever the cause, the internees will bury the corpse in the yard without any formalities."

At this point I admittedly went to the front of the book to find out when this story was first published. It sounded so much like the horror movies from the fifties and early sixties and just didn't fit in with my ideas of how the situation might be handled today, or hopefully, in the future.

Unless there is something that Saramago isn't telling us, it seems too planned and inhumane for the first six people to be treated in this manner, quarantine and threats notwithstanding.

But Octavio Paz taught me one thing: Believe everything you read…in a work of fiction.

There is a very interesting and intense method in which the heart of the story is being laid out in these opening chapters. The characters are linked by chance meetings, then each, almost as if infected by virus, become subject to the affliction of the odd white blindness.

What Saramago uses here in the plotting is a thread of movement, as the characters meet briefly, often unaware of each other, and move away and back into their own private lives or spaces to shortly thereafter face the trauma of suddenly losing their sight. Most are alone (the young female prostitute the only exception so far) when struck. We can only imagine the feeling. And Saramago reveals that instant to the reader as suddenly as it hits the character:

These two characters suspect, or rather have a moment's worry about the possibility of going blind just a few thoughts before they do. The doctor getting a strange overwhelming feeling after he's done some intense reading on the subject; the thief feels guilt, and from guilt, paranoia about catching it from the steering wheel of the car of the blind man he helped and then stole his car.

Very nicely done.

Saramago starts off the story in a familiar place, in traffic stopped at a red light. We begin to feel the restlessness of the drivers, the pedestrians, the anxiety that comes naturally with watching movement that at intervals, comes to a halt, bidden by a change of colored lights.

He then eases us into a conflict, that of one driver not moving at the change to green light. He gives us a list of possible reasons as he brings us closer to the car, the driver waving frantically. And then the moment:

Ah, so by page 2 we already understand the title of the novel. The anxiety we felt at the sudden inexplicable stop in flow of traffic that mimics the halt in what we've come to expect in reality, is released by being given the information.

But the story is just beginning, and we understand that, despite this one buildup of tension that is resolved; we know why, we know the answer. We move on to the next situation as it dawns on us.; the man cannot see to drive himself home and must depend upon a passerby to assist him. In the background looms the real tension: why did he suddenly go blind–and not just normal blind–but a whiteness instead of the blank slate of black we've understood blindness to be.

Okay, Saramago then leads us through the man's accustoming himself to his home environment while he waits for his wife to come home. There is a knocked-over vase of flowers that splinters and cuts him even as the hardwood floor is being damaged from the water. They call and make an emergency appointment with an opthamologist and discover that the Good Samaritan has in fact stolen the man's car. Plenty of action, plenty of tension and conflict, and plenty of emotional reaction as the man wonders what has happened and his relationship with his wife (loving) is seen through their movements.

Somehow we know that this story will not be a simple one for that one detail bothers us more than the horror of McCarthy's dark judge: why is his blindness white?

Saramago has also chosen to not only disregard quoted dialogue, but runs on his sentences into each other in a unique manner:

While it is relatively easy to follow the dialogue and understand who is speaking, I wonder at the purpose other than to quicken the pace of the reading to follow a more realistic conversational pattern. Though Saramago handles it well, I dread thinking about what the copycat, less experienced writers will do with this style