Examples Of Juxtaposition In Blindness

In Blindness, Jose Saramago uses both juxtaposition and imagery to represent the concept of “being evil for the greater good”; moreover, Saramago’s purpose is to convey how one’s morality and decisions are influenced by other factors such as a dictatorship.

To begin with, there was a blindness that started spreading from person to person. First, it was the blind man, then the thief, the doctor, the girl with glasses, the boy with the squint, the doctor’s wife, and the man with the eyepatch. It’s important to note that the doctor’s wife isn’t actually blind. She lied to the ministry to be able to stay close to her husband and to be able to take care of those around her. The ministry finds out that this is a spreading disease and decides to

Before the wife gets all of the women out of the hoodlums’ ward, she has a discussion with the new main hoodlum. The hoodlum claims that no one in the building will receive food but she’s not concerned because, “from now on we shall be collecting the food, and you can eat what you hoarded there” (Saramago, 192). However, over the next couple of days, no one received food due to the soldier’s not bringing in containers of food. After days without any containers from the soldiers, the man with the eyepatch leads a group of blind people near the hoodlums' ward where they will be getting the food. They tried getting past the barricade of beds the hoodlums’ had placed and lost two blind acquaintances. Chaos ensued and a blind woman rummaged through her belongings, “until she found a tiny object which she pressed in the palm of her hand” (Saramago, 211). Here, Saramago uses imagery for the readers to visualize what is going on in the ward and what the blind woman is currently doing. The blind woman believes, “ we witnessed how the strong cruelly took the bread from the mouths of the weak” (Saramago, 211). She walks to the hoodlums' ward and sets the room on fire which causes the rest of the wards to be set on fire as well. This scene portrays how others follow or change their morals due to the dictatorship they’ve experienced. The blind woman did what she believed to be right; she did it for the greater good. She was the one who was evil for the greater good. Comparing this to Light from “Death Note”, Light did what he believed to be right. He killed many criminals to make the world a better place but in the end, he was the only evil one. This juxtaposes what the blind woman did; She freed those who were suffering from hunger and the holding the hoodlums had on the blind people by setting the place