Jorge Luis Borges 'Blindness'

Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, librarian, and professor just so happens to also have been a blind man. He lived from 1899 to 1986 and was very influential amongst the writers of modern times. Borges addresses and discredits the common misleading impression that all blind people live a completely pitch black world, that all blind people are depressed to various extents, and that due to their disability they are narrow-minded; through “Blindness” Borges explains that blind people actually see shadows and even certain colors and they they are not at all depressed, on the contrary, they are actually far more imaginative and have sharpened their other senses thus Borges also touching on the figurative conditions of blindness.

Judging from

When he says, “People generally imagine the blind as enclosed in a black world. There is for example, Shakespeare’s line: “Looking into the darkness which the blind do see.” If we understand darkness as blackness, then Shakespeare is wrong” (377). Borges uses an allusion to Shakespeare to disclose to readers the knowledge that there is actually a few particular colors that some of the blind can see and they can also perceive certain things such as shadows, higher frequencies, and even something known as visual tinnitus.“Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.”...“[A] world that is inconvenient, an undefined world from which certain colors emerge”. (381) Furthermore, now that he has asserted himself, he begins to elaborate that although blindness may be a setback or ‘inconvenience’ as Jorge Borges puts it; it is nothing that the individual cannot overcome and instead use to one’s advantage. One of the places where the mood/tone of perseverance and optimism come into play, thus the literary tools and structure all flow into one piece of literature, like calm ocean waves lapping at the

the enhancing of the other senses, using blindness to one’s benefit and even the ethical demeanor of an individual who is blind. “In the course of the many lectures-too many lectures-I have given, I’ve observed that people tend to prefer the personal to the general, the concrete to the abstract. I will begin, then, by referring to my own modest blindness. Modest, because it is total blindness in one eye, but only partial in the other.” (377) The writer is uses aphorism refers to the feelings/emotions of himself and of others as well through his established credibility. “...[M]y father and my grandmother, who both died blind- blind, laughing, and brave as I also hope to die. They inherited many things- blindness, for example- but one does not inherit courage. I know that they were brave.” (377). Thus, Borge’s hinting at the figurative circumstances of being blind; he notes the blind- simply put- as being more grateful, humble, kind, and just being better human beings in a general sense of morality/ethicality. In hindsight, he is referring to the blind people he was close with, acquainted with for that matter- consequently, he cannot speak for the blind population as a whole by saying that blindness will indeed make a person a better one, so it does strengthen his argument when he directly states that he knows that they were brave as