The Outside World

Saramago has brought into Blindness a two new characters that have added to the suspense of the book. One of the characters is the man that was at the doctor's office with a patch over his bad eye, and the second is a mysterious man that the reader doesn't know who they are. It has added a twist to the story, and I foreshadow that this 'mysterious blind man' will turn out to be some important person or someone of high raking in society. When the doctor asked who the mystery man is, the response is, "A blind man, just a blind man. For that is all we have here" (Saramago 129).

The chapter begins with there being talk about how now the asylum is completely full and how that now the rations of food are going to be harder to give out and how the situation has become disturbing and utterly filthy. It goes on to explain how when the man with the patch entered the first ward and asked if there was a bed, which there was, the one the car thief had occupied before he was shot, and the doctor, with the help of his wife noticing that he was the one man missing from his patients the day of the first case of blindness. The doctor asks him if he is that man and then feels his face to re-assure his findings. The doctor's wife sees this new internees watch working and hears the time on the radio that this man bought and re-sets her watch in utter joy. This almost goes bad for her because some her her wind her watch and ask what just occurred, after all a blind person can't see a watch. The radio turns out to provide the internees with information of the growing epidemic of 'white blindness' and the patch man tells all the internees what was going on outside the asylum before he went blind. He described car crashes, whole families going blind, and a growing scare throughout the city. Then the internees in the 1st ward 'play a game' telling each other the last thing they saw before they went blind. The internees come to the conclusion that it was fear that caused them all to go 'blind'.