Novel: Blindness

Overview
Blindness, published in 1995 by José Saramago, presents a stark allegory about society under duress. An unexplained epidemic of sudden, white blindness sweeps an unnamed city, and the state's response exposes the fragility of civic order. One character, the doctor's wife, retains her sight and becomes the moral and practical center for a small band of survivors.
Saramago treats the epidemic as a social experiment: stripped of names and familiar institutions, people reveal both the worst and the most resilient parts of human nature. The narrative interrogates what it means to see and to be seen, making physical vision a metaphor for empathy, responsibility, and the ethical choices that bind communities.

Plot
The outbreak begins when a man goes blind while waiting at a traffic light; contagion follows rapidly. Authorities round up the afflicted and quarantine them in an abandoned mental hospital, screening the quarantine with military oversight and gradually abandoning basic humanity. Inside, supplies dwindle, hygiene collapses, and order dissolves into brutality as some inmates organize to control food and exploit others.
A small group of patients coalesces around the doctor's wife, who pretends to be blind to remain with her husband and then secretly keeps her sight. She guides the group through the asylum's chaos and later into the ruined city when they escape. They survive by relying on her sight and on fragile bonds of solidarity, encountering human degradation, opportunism, and unexpected compassion before the epidemic suddenly reverses and the city begins to recover.

Characters and themes
Characters are mostly unnamed and described by roles or traits: the doctor's wife, the doctor, the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses, and an elderly man among others. This anonymity universalizes their experiences and underscores the novel's allegorical purpose. The doctor's wife embodies moral courage and practical care; her sight becomes a burden and a responsibility rather than a simple advantage.
Major themes include the thin veneer of civilization, the ease with which fear corrodes ethics, and the possibility of solidarity in extremity. Saramago explores how institutions meant to protect can become instruments of cruelty, and how desperation both degrades and galvanizes people. The motif of sight questions whether true vision is an ability to perceive facts or an ethical capacity to recognize fellow humans.

Style and impact
Saramago's prose is distinctive: long, flowing sentences, sparse punctuation, and a narrative voice that slips between irony, intimacy, and moral observation. Dialogue runs within paragraphs without traditional quotation marks, creating a breathless, communal tone that mirrors the collapse of boundaries between characters. The result is at once lyrical and disorienting, intensifying the novel's claustrophobic atmosphere.
Critically acclaimed and widely read, Blindness helped cement Saramago's reputation for provocative, morally charged fiction and contributed to his later Nobel Prize in Literature. Its bleak yet humane vision has inspired stage and film adaptations and continues to provoke reflection about social responsibility, the ethics of power, and what people reveal about themselves when the structures that order life fall away.