Blindness

I've just finished Blindness by José Saramago. It's a book about a town and suddenly a man becomes blind. People around him help him home, one steals his car after he drove it home to the blind guy, but changed his mind. Everyone in contact with the blind one, goes blind the next day. Among the early blind people is an eye doctor who examined the first blind man. The Authority tries to stop the illness by putting all the blind people in an old mental asylum, keeping the blind in one ward and the people they were in contact with in the other one. They have armed guards to keep them in the asylum. After a little while more people come, and there are a group of people taking control and try to make everyone pay for food. The eye doctor's wife lied to the guards and told them she turned blind too, but she can see. The book is really about how people change when they loose sight and what people can make themselves do in order to survive. What would happen to the world if everyone turned blind? Would the world stop? Would everyone change to the worse or would some still be helpful and think of others? Who would take lead and be in charge? It's an interesting book and it reminds me a bit of The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Now there are no island to survive at, but the world suddenly turned into one. It's chaos and somebody have to restore order again. I like the questions the novel raises. Even though it creates this artificial distance between the persons in the novel by not using names on the characters. We get to know them, but miss a part of them. But on the other hand, the novel is about people loosing one of their senses having to cope with that too.