Blindness by José Saramago
Published 1995 · 120,726 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Blindness to read?
Blindness scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Saramago's prose, rendered in Giovanni Pontiero's English translation, draws on contemporary accessible vocabulary with no archaisms or specialized terminology. Words are chosen for rhythm and accumulation rather than rarity. Occasional elevated diction appears in the narrator's essayistic asides, but readers encounter no lexical barriers comparable to Melville or Pynchon.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- Saramago dispenses entirely with quotation marks and paragraph breaks for dialogue, folding speech into long paragraphs where speakers must be distinguished by context and register. Sentences routinely extend for two hundred or more words through chained subordinate clauses. The effect is immersive and demanding: readers must track who is speaking across paragraphs with no typographical cues, a difficulty well above Proust and approaching Faulkner.
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- The novel is grounded in visceral concrete scenes—ward conditions, bodily degradation, food scarcity, sexual violence—but the narrator regularly steps in with extended philosophical commentary, generalizing from the particular to questions of civilization, guilt, and moral consciousness. This balance of the physical and the essayistic puts it above 2666 (65) but well below Waiting for Godot (85).
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Blindness accumulates through sustained intensity and repetition rather than layered plotlines or encyclopedic reference. Each chapter dwells at length in a single phase of the crisis; there is no historical apparatus, no parallel timelines, and no dense allusive structure. The reading experience is closer to Austerlitz (50) than to War and Peace (80), with the density coming from psychological and moral texture rather than informational load.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The narrator is explicitly interpretive and morally authoritative, regularly telling the reader what events mean. The allegory is stated rather than implied: the white blindness is a metaphor for moral blindness, and the doctor's wife as sole witness is never ambiguous in her function. Readers must still assemble meaning from the parable structure and the nameless characters, but the novel demands less inference than Pedro Paramo (85) or The Great Gatsby (65).
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- The white blindness operates as the novel's central symbol from its first pages—a visual impairment that figures humanity's moral failure to see the other. The asylum stands for civilization stripped to its instincts; food functions as power; the doctor's wife's sight represents the burden of witness. Symbols are dense and sustained throughout, closer to Moby-Dick (90) in their systematic elaboration than to the lighter symbolism of To Kill a Mockingbird (45).
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Saramago's narrator is largely earnest, speaking with direct moral authority rather than through irony or indirection. Dark humor appears in the bureaucratic loudspeaker announcements and the soldiers' self-justifications, creating a bitter gap between official language and human reality. This ironic register is intermittent rather than structural, placing Blindness closer to Moby-Dick (45) than to Lolita (75) or The Sellout (85).
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Sight is restored at the novel's end, providing literal closure, but Saramago refuses moral resolution: the final pages leave open whether civilization will rebuild differently or repeat its failures. The returned sight feels less like triumph than return to precariousness. The novel withholds the usual satisfactions of the parable—wisdom clearly stated, lessons drawn—putting it between Beloved (40) and 2666 (92).
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- The structure is linear and chronological, following a single group of characters from the onset of the epidemic through quarantine, escape, and partial restoration. There are no timeline jumps, no multiple narrators, and no formal experiments beyond the punctuation style. The narrator's essayistic digressions introduce a mild associative structure, but overall Blindness is considerably simpler than Midnight's Children (68) and closer to War and Peace (40) in its forward momentum.
How Blindness is regarded
Blindness holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.