Blindness

The story begins at an ordinary intersection in a city that is never named. The light turns green, the cars move forward, and one of them doesn't budge. The driver, stopped in the middle of the road, says he can't see. But it isn't darkness: he says he sees everything white, as if he were submerged in a sea of milk.

A man shows up to help, takes the blind man home, and then steals his car. The wife arrives, worried, and takes her husband to the eye doctor. The exams show nothing wrong with his eyes. Neither science nor common sense can explain what happened.

José Saramago's book never explains the cause of the blindness, and that's on purpose. He isn't writing science fiction: he's writing an allegory, a story in which the impossible is used to show something true about people and about society.

The white blindness begins to spread. The car thief goes blind, then the eye doctor who treated the first man, then the people who were in the waiting room of the office: a young woman in dark glasses, an old man with a black patch over one eye, a boy with a squint. Before long, anyone who has had contact with them loses their sight too.

The author treats the phenomenon as contagion, and the government's reaction is the one you'd expect from a frightened power: isolate. Before any medical help comes the order to separate the sick from the healthy. Fear comes before compassion, and the decision is made by those who can still see, in the name of protecting the majority.

The image is powerful because it recalls real epidemics. When a new disease appears, the first collective reaction is usually to look for someone to blame and to push away the infected, even before understanding what is happening.

The first blind people are taken to an abandoned asylum, turned into a quarantine space. Soldiers keep watch outside and have orders to let no one leave. Anyone who tries to escape is shot. As more people go blind, they are sent there too, and the place begins to fill up.

The building is a symbol of exclusion: a space that once served to hide people society didn't want to see. Now the blind are placed there, far from the eyes of those who can still see, receiving food tossed in by soldiers who are afraid to come near.

From the first pages, the novel shows that when authorities treat people as a problem to be stored away, dignity is lost quickly. There are no doctors, no explanations, only rules announced over a loudspeaker and the promise that everything will be sorted out.