Blindness=Fear

Jose Saramago’s novel, Blindness, gives readers a lot to think about and examine in society. The characters loose their sight and must adapt to their new world and new reality. This offers a lot a lot to a reader in terms of how a society is formed from the ground up, and how morally developed humans are. But another interesting aspect of Saramago’s work is that the characters all go blind for a reason, and this reason directly relates to the theme of the novel.
The blindness spreads to the entire population, so the reader knows that everyone is guilty of the crime that inflicts it. Saramago makes it relatively clear when his characters are discussing when they went blind. “Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses, Never a truer word, that could not be truer, we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind” (129). Saramago gives this to his readers, but it is their job to discover what this fear is of. The fear that he speaks of is a fear of each other. A fear that man has of his fellow man. Humans are social beings and define themselves through others, so when humans fear each other they build an entire society based on fear. We can see this in the novel in the characters of the first blind man and the thief. Even before the thief went blind, he was still acting in fear of others and doing things only to benefit himself, as if he was already in the mindset that many were in while at the asylum. When the first blind man finds out, he wishes blindness on his enemy, which depicts the justice through revenge attitude that develops in the blind society. This shows the fear and distrust of man towards fellow man, and in this respect blindness is not a condemnation, but a remedy. When one is blind he is forced to trust his fellow man because he cannot survive on his own. If humans cannot learn to live with and trust each other under these circumstances then they will perish. Blindness is a cure to the fear of society. In a way it opens the eyes of the people to what they have become and what they must change. It is only when the characters truly become able to trust and care for each other when they begin to see again. The author portrays this when the man with the eye patch tells his companions to go on without him because he is too much of a burden, but they do not. Even after all they have been through they stick together and they learn the lesson that Saramago is hoping his readers will also learn.