Blindness

In José Saramago's Blindness, an unexplained epidemic of white blindness spreads through an unnamed city, beginning with a man stopped at a traffic light. The authorities confine those affected in an abandoned institution under armed guard, where scarcity and fear rapidly expose the violence hidden beneath civic order. Only the doctor's wife retains her sight, though she pretends to be blind so that she can remain with her husband. Her secret places her in the difficult position of witness, guide, and reluctant caretaker as a small group tries to survive both institutional cruelty and the collapse beyond the walls.

Saramago withholds conventional names, identifying people by roles such as the first blind man, the girl with dark glasses, and the doctor. That choice turns the epidemic into more than an individual disaster: it tests what remains of responsibility when familiar rules, property, and public services disappear. The long, flowing prose keeps voices close together and makes moral choices feel collective rather than neatly assigned to heroes and villains. Blindness gains its force from the tension between degradation and solidarity, showing that the capacity to see has ethical meaning only when it becomes attention to other lives.