Essay About Blindness
(José Saramago)
A great piece of this Nobel winner. This novel is about a strange plague of "white blindness" which affects a whole community. A man went blind in mysterious circumstances while he was driving his car, fortune that affects everyone who surrounds him within a short time. Fearing a propagation of the epidemic, the government takes the affected people to live in quarantine occupying an empty mental hospital. Among this series of anonymous characters--the doctor, the girl with glasses, the strabismic boy--lives a woman, the unique immune person to this harm, who is forced to hide her seer condition in this blind community fearing abuse and reprisal. The dynamics of the blind from the mental hospital present an appalling vision of human nature, where the "strong over the weak" law is maintained even among beings affected by the same tragedy. This induces us to question about solidarity, abuse of power, and its presence in every kind of communities and circumstances. The way in which this novel was written makes it difficult to understand, because the lack of a grammatical structure confuses. Sometimes, it was difficult for me to know who was saying something, which generates in a very good way a blindness sensation and the uncertainty of not being sure of what's around us. The descriptions, specially the smell ones, are very powerful and attain to transmit the rottenness and decline of the environment in which this group of blind people are presented. Certainly, I had questioned myself so many times about how much we depend on our eyes, but I had never seen it in such a brutal way until I read this piece. Saramago puts us in a situation that shows the fast crumbling of the society facing an event of this magnitude. It's an story of decadence. Human reactions to this, how the initial solidarity changes into distrust and, then, into selfishness facing a surviving necessity. How do we grasp this survival at any price, no matter the conditions we stoop to, putting aside any hint of dignity that makes us humans, only because we want to continue breathing and feeling alive.
Resumos Relacionados
- Blindness
- Essay Over Blindness
- Vision
- Lord Of The Flies
- Assay On The Blindness
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