After the patients leave the hospital, she houses, feeds, and guides them. She feigns blindness to follow her husband to the quarantined hospital, where she cares for, cleans, and defends the other internees. Nevertheless, the doctor’s wife proves more than anyone else that people retain their capacity for goodness even in the darkest situations. Ultimately, even the book’s most altruistic and sympathetic character- the doctor’s wife-is forced to abandon her principles because of circumstances: at the end of the book, she steals food from blind worshippers in a church in order to feed the other protagonists. Saramago describes these rapes in graphic detail, forcing the reader to confront the profundity of humankind’s capacity for violence and the frightening possibility that society might enable rather than repress these violent instincts. Inside the hospital, social organization also exacerbates humanity’s worst tendencies: an armed group of thugs takes control of the wards and starts hoarding all the food, demanding everyone’s valuables, and raping all the women in the hospital. Surely enough, the frightened soldiers soon start massacring the blind.
This is apparent from the beginning of the book, when the car-thief steals the first blind man’s car and the Government shuts the blind in abandoned mental hospital, declaring that anyone who leaves the hospital will be shot on sight. Saramago shows that all humans are capable of extreme selfishness and brutal violence.
For Saramago, people are both altruistic and selfish, or good and evil, by nature-which means it is up to them and the social structures they create to determine which side will prevail. Although people selfishly panic during crises, no situation can completely eliminate their capacity for solidarity and moral conscience. But Saramago does not think that people are inevitably selfish: rather, he suggests that they are capable of as much radical good as they are horrific evil. Mysteriously struck blind, locked up in an abandoned mental hospital, and forced to fend for themselves, Saramago’s characters quickly come face to face with the ugliest aspects of human nature: they compete for scarce food, soldiers slaughter them, and armed thugs starve them and repeatedly rape the women.
0 kommentar(er)
