For instance he talks about the doctors wife being distraught about not winding her watch. There are so many incongruous elements in time and space, its like a Dali painting. I am an ophthalmologist myself, I found this story to be an intriguing thought experiment, but I was waylaid by the fact that the author made no attempt, or possibly consciously avoided the attempt, to make the story scientifically plausible. In the story he has the blind listening to readings from the only sighted individual as their only source of entertainment, and he may have intended this as a more powerful verbal parable that a written one. Maybe this was the intention of Saramago. The endless run-on sentences and lack of proper names makes the reading hard to follow, but as a narrative, it isnt so bad. I agree with the reviewer that pointed out that this parable is much more accessible in the oral than in the visual format. Blindness is a powerful parable, but I think it has to be read as a surrealistic allegory rather than any attempt to portray the situation as it might actually occur in the real world. Saramago is a Nobel laureate, so I think we have to credit him with having insight worthy of our attention.
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