1. What meanings can we attribute to the white blindness? To what extent does it represent:
• Ignorance?
• Political/governmental ineptitude?
• The absence of personal/social morality?
• The absence of human empathy/compassion?
• The failure of imagination?

2. Saramago differentiated normal blindness from this “white sickness” in that one was “the absence of light that covered the appearance of things and beings, leaving them intact behind their black veil” whereas the other leaves the victims “plunged into a whiteness so luminous that it swallowed up the very things and beings thus making them twice as invisible.” – What does this differentiation signify?

3. After a civil servant refuses to let the doctor talk to the minister of health, the doctor states “this is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.” Yet earlier in the novel while describing the state of mind of the car thief after stealing the car, Saramago writes that “the moral conscience […] is something that exists and has always existed.” – which of these statements do you find yourself more in agreement with?

4. Waking to her second day in the mental hospital, the doctor's wife thinks, "what fragile walls we'd make" against our enemies. What "fragile walls" are erected, demolished, or made useless by the blindness?

5. Why do you think the doctor’s wife was the only person saved from the “white sickness”?

6. Early in the story, the doctor’s wife feels “contemptible and obscene” for being able to “observe the behavior of human beings who did not even suspect her presence” later on, after leaving the asylum, she develops a sense of responsibility; “the responsibility of having my eyesight when others have lost theirs”. Do you think these feelings of guilt/responsibility are justified? What do these feelings tell you about the character of the doctor’s wife?

7. “what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with others, not that which we have with ourselves.” – what does the doctor’s wife mean by this observation? Do you agree? How is this illustrated in the novel?

8. “I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.” – how do you interpret this line of dialogue between the Doctor and his wife at the very end of the novel?

9. “as the saying rightly goes, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” – Saramago is reported to have been a proponent of libertarian communism and an atheist. Did you notice any political or religious messaging throughout your reading of this book?

10. Why does Saramago provide no names for his characters and their city and country? What are the effects of this namelessness?

11. How do the women in the novel differ from the men in their attitude toward the blindness and the resulting conditions of life? What moral, emotional, psychological, and imaginative capacities do the women possess in contrast to the men?

1. “two women from the neighbourhood looked on inquisitively at the sight of their neighbour being led by the arm but neither of them thought of asking, Have you got something in your eye, it never occurred to them nor would he have been able to reply, Yes, a milky sea.”

2. “When all is said and done, there is not all that much difference between helping a blind man only to rob him afterwards and looking after some tottering and stammering old person with one eye on the inheritance.”

3. “From one of the containers leaked a white liquid which was slowly spreading towards the pool of blood, to all appearances it was milk, the colour unmistakable.”

4. “If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals”

5. “Fear can cause blindness, said the girl with dark glasses […] we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind”

6. “you have no idea what it is like to watch two blind people fighting, Fighting has always been, more or less, a form of blindness”

7. “This is the image of my body, she thought, the image of the body of all the women here”

8. “And when is it necessary to kill, she asked herself as she headed in the direction of the hallway, and she herself answered the question, When what is still alive is already dead.”

9. “The blind are always at war, always have been at war.”

10. “Just as the habit does not make the monk, the scepter does not make the king.”

11. “it will be impossible in this unified mass of molten metal, to distinguish which are the scissors and which the keys”

12. “Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters”

13. “it even used to be said there is no such thing as blindness, only blind people, when the experience of time has taught us nothing other than that there are no blind people, but only blindness.”