Blindness

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She seemingly contracted the “white-blindness” while visiting the doctor due to conjunctivitis (hence the dark glasses). McKellar wrote the script so audiences would see the world through the eyes of the protagonist, the doctor's wife. He ultimately proposes a middle ground between these two tendencies: people should strive to express themselves and navigate their identities through personal narrative, but rather than attempting to conclusively define reality through those narratives, people must accept ambiguity and uncertainty. The story is hardly an escape from the present moment: an infectious and instantaneous blindness spreads across the globe as an overnight pandemic, bringing the world to a fearful halt. The crux is "who has the power and who doesn't; who controls the food supply and exploits the rest".

The Donmar’s regular seating has been taken out and replaced with wooden chairs scattered about in suitably distanced pairs. The dog of tears is a dog that joins the small group of blind people when they leave the quarantine.McKellar explained the changes he intended to make from the novel and what the focus would be, and two days later he and Fichman left Saramago's home with the rights.

His death marks the point when Ward 1 takes back control, with the doctor's wife's threat to kill one of the men from Ward 3 for every day her ward goes without food.Soon after this, the narrator notes that the hospital is now full and that the internees finally have enough food. Meirelles ensures that the obviousness of the symbolism (in the global village the blind need guidance! There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing.

Saramago originally refused to sell the rights to Meirelles, Whoopi Goldberg, or Gael García Bernal. Meirelles chose São Paulo as the primary backdrop for Blindness, though scenes were also filmed in Osasco, São Paulo, Brazil; Guelph, Ontario, Canada; and Montevideo, Uruguay. The film also contains visual cues, such as the 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. But he is also mocking the apparent authority of his own narrator, whom he emphasizes only provides a single and incomplete picture of events. The struggle of the individual against bureaucracy and anonymity is one of the great subjects of modern literature, and Saramago is often matched with Kafka as one of its premier exponents.Saramago thus shows how the narratives people choose to tell themselves can empower to define their identities, but also how these very narratives can be rooted in oppressive ideology and shaped by those in power. New food stops arriving, and without assistance from the soldiers, some of the starving internees decide that they were better off under the thugs’ rule. And finally, because her lone figure, there in the box, surrounded by emptiness and absence on every side, as if she inhabited a void, seemed to be the expression of the most absolute solitude. The novel's translation in 1988 as Baltasar and Blimunda, by the late Giovanni Pontiero, brought Saramago to the English-speaking world, and it was turned into an opera in 1990.