Empty Stomachs

Blindness has seemed to be going in the direction that I thought that it would, having more and more people going blind and the asylum becoming crowed and smelling to high Heaven.
Jose Saramago has made his characters round without even making the reader be able to see them. The characters voices, the language used with the individual, sets them apart from each other. When Saramago has people talking in his book he doesn't used the formal, ".....", style; he just has people talk and doesn't use the quotations and has multiple people talk in one sentence without referring to who is doing the talking. The voice of the person signifies who they are.

The chapter starts out with the doctor's wife waking to realize that she had forgot to wind her watch, and she starts to weep and the prostitute goes and comforts her. The doctor's wife says, "We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep" (Saramago 96). After that there are many internees that are waiting for food in the hallway, waiting for a voice on the loud speaker to tell them that the food was arriving. But, when the loud speaker went on and the food was to have been said to be delivered, many of the internees who had previously been anxiously been waiting for the food, questioned whether or not they should go and get the food due to the previous massacre. Eventually they decided to go, after all with no food they would die eventually. The food was placed outside the asylum, so it made for the internees to have to try to find it in the yard. This caused many to go moving around the ground till someone finally found the food with the help, directions, from the army official. One man stood out, he had decided to stay holding onto the rope when he went out with the group to find the food, and once he had decided to let go he had gotten lost and was the only one stranded in the yard as the others got the food back to the doors. He panicked and screamed for help; one of the soldiers told him the wrong directions, telling him to come towards them so that he would be shoot (I love the comment by Saramago on the description of the bad soldier, "...belonged to that class of people who are not to be trusted with a rifle" (Saramago 103). The sergeant tells the lost man to stop and turn around, and the other internees make noise for the lost man to follow. During this time multiple blind internees had taken multiple rations of food and ran off to hide. This was noticed by the other internees that decided when they got back to the others that they should eat and wait for the 'stealers' to come back to the wings. This is the first time that the blind internees agree as a whole that they need some sort of organization. The 'stealers' never show up, they seemed to have hidden themselves. The chapter end with a lot more blind people being transfered to the asylum and there was a fight between the new 'blind internees' and the 'contaminated internees' that lead to some of the 'contaminated' to becoming 'blind'. As well as all of that the man with the black patch on his eye, from the doctor's office, has showed up and found the corpses on his first visit.