Jose Saramago's Blindness And The Luxborough Galley

Throughout our lives, we are faced with difficult situations, and possibly even life or death situations. As humans, our instinct is to take these difficult situations and find the best way to get over them. Sometimes these situations and predicaments get so difficulty that there is no way out of it. When this happens, people will do things that they would never dream of doing in order to survive. In history, we can see many incidents where people have gone to extremes just to survive these difficulty situations, such as; the people of the Donner Party, those associated with the Andes Flight Disaster, and the crew members of the Luxborough Galley. In Jose Saramago’s Blindness, we see characters in the book have to make difficult decisions during life or death situations, such as guards killing blind people in hopes of not contracting the blindness, blind citizens stealing goods from stores and even people preaching

Just as the people of the Donner Party, the Andes Flight Disaster, and the Luxborough Galley had resorted to cannibalism and other extreme means to survive, so did the characters in Blindness. At first, the citizens of blindness were not resulting to extremes in order to survive because they had guards who were providing food, but as the story went on almost every single person went blind. This is when the people began to resort to things such as raiding stores, stealing, eating raw animals, and even cannibalism. These illegal, horrendous acts can lead a reader to wonder what these people’s motives were. Are these people simply afraid of what comes after death? Or are these people trying their best to stay alive for their families? Either way, any normal human being would not commit these acts unless they were faced with possible death. Personal opinion can only identify if these actions were