I think about the room full of books that will have no more significance to me than a pile of bricks or cement blocks, something I held reverence for that is now less than useless. The author avoids building characters by constantly describing them as "the doctors wife","the man with the eye patch" etc, letting your own imagination fill in the gaps,which may be a comment on corporate depersonalisation, but this was lost on me at the time of reading . He is brought to an opthamologist and his trip to see the doctor spreads this contagion at the speed of a prairie fire. The author here has created a society descending into complete ciaos but also has to take into account what would happen if everyone went suddenly blind.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The only one in the asylum who miraculously is still able to see, she takes care of her husband and of those who became her new family: the girl with the dark glasses, the boy with the squint, the old man with the black eye patch, the first blind man and the first blind man's wife - the characters' names are never mentioned, which is an interesting choice the author made. If he did, he'd realize that there were a thousand easy answers to the dilemmas he created for his characters, and he could have then focused more on the internal filth of their souls than the external excrement of their bodies. None of the characters are given names so its the 'doctors wife' or 'girl with dark glasses' as names cease to matter to the blind.The film was a good, standard, Hollywood film meaning it appeals to the masses, has pretty people and no depth and has been designed to make money.

Blindness ( Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award.Infected people being sent for quarantine, their hellish life there, how they survive when the governance collapsed and how it ends. It's a white blindness that obliterates all vision immediately and is assumed to be highly contagious. After a lengthy and traumatic quarantine in an asylum, the group bands together in a family-like unit to survive by their wits and by the good fortune that the doctor's wife has escaped the blindness. The life of the quarantine camp briskly degenerates into an existential hell where the blind are victimized first by the way they have been rounded up and shoved into what was a mental hospital, after that they are not given proper food either, and most appallingly by how they are reduced in their attempt to stay alive.

We can all say what we would be capable of doing and not capable of doing when we are sitting in a bar casually munching on free peanuts and pretzels between pints of beer.

The reader accompanies a group of ten people, the first victims of the scourge that will quarantine, who, in their misfortune, have the unexpected luck of having a woman who can still see among them. Weaving together memories of his Portuguese childhood, Nobel Prize–winner Saramago (1922–2010) presents a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young man. We sometimes need an epidemic blindness to wake up and see what happens underneath the polished surface of our civilisation.