Themes

Alright peeps, since I've already finished the book I think it's time to talk about some themes.

• Survival of the fittest
• Blindness: devastating and eye opening(darkness vs. light)
• The nature of tragedy
• Fear and hysteria are fuel to disaster
• Fragility of society 

So, there are a bunch of themes that are pretty complex. My favorite ones, or the ones that stood out most to me are the nature of tragedy and how the blindness is both devastating and eye-opening. However since I've already touched on the blindness theme, I'm going to go with fear and hysteria fueling the disaster.

The nature of tragedy isn't a theme that I've really explored in the books I've read. When it appeared so clearly in Saramago's diction, imagery, and conflict it made me think. In the beginning, all the people who are blind are sent to the empty mental asylum to be quarantined. The government and the society reacted in a quick "get it away" policy. The description and realism was extremely vivid. I would imaging(unfortunately) something similar happening in the real world. The way the events played out in the book were so raw and real this book was unsettling in both my thoughts and emotions. In this way, the nature of tragedy stood out. It invoked the need to review society. 

That theme also intertwines neatly with how fear and hysteria are fuel to disaster. We'll never know from the book if the blindness could have been cured had doctors and scientists been able to do their work. However, what we do know is that that wasn't going to happen in Saramago's society in blindness. The government panicked, the people panicked and the blind panicked. Everyone suffered from this.  There's more to the disaster than just from the destruction of the society.

 Now, there are thousands and thousands of people scared for the rest of their lives as a result. How are they going to rebuild? With their new eyes that have seen and lost, and now "see" again they must continue. What's really a disaster is not that the government panicked, but that all the people played along like sheep. Letting their neighbors, friends, children, and family simply go away to be locked up. To stumble around in the blinding white, and if they make a wrong turn ( because without a doubt a blind person will not go the right way 100% of the time) they could be gunned down by fearful soldiers who out of ignorance empty their magazines on the innocent. 

The book has themes that tie together like a spiderweb. The blindness comes together with the ignorance, the panic and fear come together to bring forth hysteria. The people who have any sort of advantage, like being blind beforehand and being used to it rise, and survival becomes the most necessary aspect of life. Finally, it pulls together to show how fragile society is and how while the blindness was epic, it symbolically shows that people are comfortable in how easy life currently is.

Jose Saramago

the author of Blindness and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature