The novel Blindness, written by Jose Saramago, is a dystopian fiction that follows seven individuals and how they navigate through their lives in the wake of a mass epidemic of white blindness. The blindness captures people and engulfs them into what one blind man describes as a “milky sea” (3). The opening scene shows the first victim of the white sickness losing his sight and gradually reveals everyone he has infected, excluding a doctor’s wife. The government sends those infected into quarantine and soon the entire world has gone blind and civilization deteriorates rapidly. In this novel, Saramago uses themes such as the essence of human nature and gender relations in order to explore the nature of humans when one loses the equivalent of their soul.
The author’s purpose of the book is to generate ideas of changes in human behavior when everyone is blind and organized this by having each character portray how people would act. In order to emphasize this point, Saramago uses strategies such as adding no pronouns and disregarding the rules of punctuation. The chaotic placement of commas and periods was simultaneously surprising and intriguing. A former writer in the novel said, “I am my voice, nothing else
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I think it brought out the difference in behavior of the characters in this book. Prior to this event, the blind people were living in a sort of disorderly harmony. After the armed men came, many of the men let the women be at the mercy of the armed men and there was a complete lack of collective effort to defend the women’s dignity, which highlighted how selfish the blind men were. This passage spoke volumes of the behavior difference of the characters in this book and how blindness rapidly clouded the men’s judgement. Part