We took this up in our Lit13 class.
It's a book where
everything is unnamed. The characters, places, and even the chapters are untitled. The theme is at first elusive since the word blindness is ambiguous, but later on it will surface. It can be interpreted in many ways but we didn't focus much on its political aspect, just blindness in general. It's mostly about how blindness made people aware of their responsibility towards others, what the world wouldv'e been like if people were blind. So there. That's basically it, but like I said, it's kind of elusive because of the ambiguity so it's really open to different interpretations.
The novel is clutter-y and made of run-ons. The only punctuation marks used were the period and the comma. It contributes to the chaotic and fast-paced theme of the story, but that's just also the way Saramago writes.
There are a lot of philosophical, metaphysical, and other notable quotes from the book. Here are some:
*** "Then, as if he had just discovered something that he should have known a long time ago, he murmured sadly,
This is the stuff we're made of, half indifference and half malice."
*** "in truth, the eyes are nothing more than lenses, it is the brain that actually does the seeing,"
*** "People get so used to having eyes that they think they can use them when they no longer serve for anything."
*** "If we cannot live like human beings, at least let us do everything not to live entirely like animals."
*** "When the spirit is will, your feet are light."
*** "there are certain things that are best left unexplained, it's best just to say what happened, not to probe on people's inner thoughts and feelings"
*** "let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood."
*** "That we're going to die is something we know from the moment we are born, That's why, in some ways, it's as if we were born dead."
*** "people were blind yet managed to live, she herself would also have to turn blind in order to understand that people get used to anything, especially if they ceased to be people, and even if they have not quite reached that point,"
*** "we're already dead, we're blind because we're dead, or if you would prefer me to put it another way, we're dead because we're blind,"
*** "Today is today, tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings,
today is my responsibility, not tomorrow if I should turn blind, the resposibility of having my eyesight when others have lost theirs"
*** "blind in eyes and blind in feelings, because the feelings with which we have lived and which we allowed us to live as we were, depended on our having eyes we were born with,
without eyes feelings become something different,"
*** "It is not only in nature that from time to time not everything is lost and something is gained."
*** "Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters,"
*** "the human body is an organised system, it lives as long as it keeps organised, and death is only the effect of a disorganization...
By organising itself, to organise onself is, in a way, to begin to have eyes."
*** "The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know,
it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence, and this is what we made of it,"
***
"I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see."
