Garces, Raul (2007-09-20). "Glover Films Blindness in Uruguay". ABC News. The Walt Disney Company. Archived from the original on March 18, 2009 . Retrieved 2008-03-11. A man with a handgun appoints himself "king" of his ward, and takes control of the food deliveries, first demanding the other wards' valuables, and then for the women to have sex with their men. In an effort to obtain necessities, several women reluctantly submit to being raped. One of the women is killed by her assailant, and the doctor's wife retaliates, killing the "king" with a pair of scissors. Independently, other raped women sneak to the dead king's ward and set it on fire, which rapidly engulfs the building, with many inmates dying in the ensuing chaos. The survivors who escape the building discover that the guards have abandoned their posts, and they venture out into the city. 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.”

People waiting at a traffic light. All of us can see that before our inner eyes, relive thousands of similar situations we have experienced ourselves, without ever giving them a moment of consideration. Thus starts Saramago's Blindness. But there is a disruption. One car is not following the rules all take for granted. The car doesn't move when the light switches to green. People are annoyed, frustrated, disturbed in their routines, but not worried: I wanted to reach out to the doctor's wife, tell her I was here for her. I could not believe she was tasked with being the only one who could SEE the problem, and I could not believe how much had been laid at one woman's excrement-covered feet. I wasn't surprised when she privately wished for the blindness to strike her, so she wouldn't be asked to show up and save the world. The city afflicted by the blindness is never named, nor the country specified. Few definite identifiers of culture are given, which contributes an element of timelessness and universality to the novel. However, there are some signs that hint that the country is Saramago's homeland of Portugal: the main character is shown eating chouriço, a spicy sausage, and some dialogue in the original Portuguese employs the familiar "tu" second-person singular verb form (a distinction absent in most of Brazil). The church, with all its saintly images, is likely of the Catholic variety. a b c Leah Cameron (September–October 2008). "Now Playing: Blindness". Creative Screenwriting Magazine. 15 (5): 60. ISSN 1084-8665. Although I found this book interesting, I didn't find it the cutting edge work of genius that I had read about. I don't think I would ever read another Saramago because life is too short to struggle through such a difficult writing style. The book took me about three times as long as if it had been written in a more usual manner. It seems to me to be an ego thing to write in a way that is completely different to everyone else. The reason there is a standard way of writing is that it is easy for us all to understand rather than having to adapt to anyone's idiosyncratic idea of spelling and grammar.National Federation of the Blind Condemns and Deplores the Movie Blindness". National Federation of the Blind. 2008-09-30. Archived from the original on 2008-10-03 . Retrieved 2008-10-01. A particularly bad band of men emerges, thieves and criminals who were probably bad before they were caged like animals. Now they want to take and break everything in the asylum, including the women.

Blindness ( Portuguese: Ensaio sobre a cegueira, meaning Essay on Blindness) is a 1995 novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. It is one of Saramago's most famous novels, along with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Baltasar and Blimunda. In 1998, Saramago received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Blindness was one of his works noted by the committee when announcing the award. [1]Within this collapsing society, however, a little group of seven people begin to work together to regain a modicum of humanity. The leader of this group is the Doctor’s Wife, the only sighted person in the novel, who has accompanied her ophthalmologist husband to the asylum, even though she is not blind. Her eyesight gives her practical and moral advantages. This sighted woman allows Saramago to explore not only the meaning of blindness but also the meaning of vision. She is instrumental in organizing the group, to keep it safe and fed, in addition to providing spiritual lucidity; she never loses her sympathetic feeling or her moral intelligence. Blindness in this regard is associated with the death of the heart and with the loss of concern for other human beings; the sight of the Doctor’s Wife, on the other hand, is associated with compassion and the retention of an innate moral compass. After an uprising, folks find out the asylum has been abandoned by the army who was until then responsible for it and they're able to leave. Realizing that what they went through in quarantine was only a detail in the huge landscape, now we follow our protagonists as they wander through the city in search of better conditions: water, food, clothes, a way to find their homes and their relatives. I thought that the book is a metaphor of the people that are walking through life without thinking about the violence and cruelty that is in front of them, their ignorance of anything that could menace their civilized life. I believe the book brings forward our fear/avoidance to see our mortality and the insignificance of our lives.