Brief Summary Of Blindness By Tim O Brien

Blindness

Major Characters

The doctor is struck blind after treating a patient that originally contracted the blindness. He is one of the first to be quarantined, along with his wife. Because he is a doctor, he has some level of authority within the ward. He knows that members of the ward look to him for leadership, and as such, he is cool-headed and calm in his decisions. He also relies on his wife to help him out since she is the one who is able to see.

The doctor’s wife is the main character of the novel, and this is mainly due to the fact she does not lose her sight. She shows her dedication early on when she refuses to leave the doctor, even faking blindness in order to join the quarantine and its horrid conditions. She becomes the leader

When the car thief begins to grope her during their trip to the restroom, she unleashes a kick that gives him a fatal wound. She also cares for the boy with the squint in the ward, and she and the man with the eye patch become lovers at the end of the novel.

The old man with the eye patch played an important role in the ward since he brought the radio that allowed the quarantined people to listen to the news from outside. He plans to attack the food hoarders, but this ultimately fails. He falls in love with the girl with dark glasses.

The man with the gun becomes the leader of the food-hoarding group. His ward takes the rations from other wards and threatens to shoot anyone who doesn’t agree to give them up. Later, he gives the other wards food only in exchange for their most valuable items, such as jewelry. When the wards run out of items to exchange, the man with the gun calls for the ward’s women to be raped in exchange for food. He is killed by the doctor’s wife during one of these

There are many ways of becoming an animal, he thought, this is just the first of them,” (93). The doctor realizes that the main thing separating humans from animals, cleanliness, has disappeared within the quarantine. The people all live in their own filth, and he knows that there will be a deeper degradation into animal qualities.

Themes

In this novel, Saramago describes human nature as being no different than animal behavior. With the breakdown of society, most members of the quarantine only care about the survival of themselves, doing whatever they can in order to obtain necessities. Even a criminal element was added into the picture, showing the extreme measures some took in order to survive.

Saramago also comments on the state of society as a whole, questioning its stability by showing how quickly it can fall into chaos. The government is incapable of properly maintaining its quarantine, and the soldiers mistreat the blind, culminating in a massacre in which several blind people are gunned down trying to receive their food.