The Absence of Humanity in the Bind City - Essay Example

"A guy comes home from a business trip and finds his wife in bed, a nervous look on her face. He opens the closet to hang up his coat, and finds his best friend standing there, naked. Stunned, he says, "Lenny, what are you doing here?" Lenny shrugs and says, "Everybody's got to be someplace." This is an extract from, a novel made up of a collection of jokes, “Plato and a platypus walk into a bar” (Cathcart and Klein 6), in which Klein and Carthcart use Jokes to bring out philosophical concepts, existentialism explored humorously. Essentially, the above is an example of an existentialism question is posed and supplied with a Hegelian answer. Existentialism can be analyzed both through humorous discourse and extremely somber and even heart wrenching prose which is exemplified in Jose Saramago’s Blindness. This essay’s point of departure is the observation by the doctor after he realizes that the people who had been herded into the asylum like sheep and locked up in inhuman condition literary degenerated to animals. It then defines existentialism in the context of the book and then delves into an examination of the absurdity that the characterized the books plot and ultimately results into an almost uncontainable anarchy that threatens destroy the society in its entirety. At the end of the day, and individual’s starting point is characterized by the sense of disorientation that ensures when their natural world becomes meaningless and confusing and this is embodied by the reaction of the people who lose their morality and humanity along with their sight. The story revolves around an explained mass epidemic of blindness that infects almost all the people in an unnamed city, as a result the social structure disintegrates and everything turn chaotic as the government and all other services become dysfunctional. Anarchy and chaos reign supreme and in an attempt to salvage the situation, the state orders all those infected to be quarantined in an abandoned mental institution. The place is soon overcrowded and the blind inmates begin living like animals and even worse. They fight for survival and some form gangs which they use to suppress the rest. The story is centered on the city doctor’s wife who miraculously was the only one who escaped the blindness and a band of several blind people who manage to escape and exemplify some sense of order by living as a family in the doctors flat while everything else is crumbling in moral decay around them. In part four of the books, soldiers arrive at the asylum where the blind have been quarantined to deliver food by they find that the numbers are too high and too eager to get the food and they panic. Consequently they fire into the crowd killing several unarmed innocents and retreat leaving the food. The internees are face with the issue of burying their dead and series disagreements arises about whether they should first bury them or eat; this culminates into a crisis as they try to determine who should have power and hold leadership in the “commune”. After the meal the doctor visits the lavatory and he is shocked at the level of disarray and chaos therein, he realizes that at this rate they will soon be no better than animals. One of the most overt philosophical readings that the book opens itself to is the existentialism point of view from this perspective, the books can be viewed as an allegory of the human condition which according to existentialism is determined by social or cultural norms. After the plague hit the city, these suddenly become far flung concepts as the inhabitants degenerated to the basest of animals using the most nefarious means to survive and exert dominance over each other. From the above passage, the doctor arrives to this conclusion when he realizes that the things that were traditionally conducted with the highest levels of decorum such as burying the dead had been relegated to minor issues and even basic hygiene was no longer adhered to. People’s lives dwindled down to bottom of the Maslow hierarchy such that they end up scrambling and sometimes killing for food in streets littered with refuse with no caring for dignity only concerned with their own food security. Without sight there is no means by which to police each other effectively and as result the social structure which holds civilization together falls apart. Among the central positions held by existentialist philosophers is that the existence precedes the essence, that is to say that one’s real self is not that which others see neither can it be defined by the societal stereotypes of functional roles of the individual. The primary consideration into ones identity is that they are an independent and conscious being therefore their true essence radically differentiated from the arbitrary essence which their immediate society uses to define them. Saramago seem to imply that humans are not in control of their being, “Inside us there is something that has no name that something is what we are (Saramago 96)”. The novel blindness presents and excellent demonstration of this existential concept by depicting individual and groups trying to survive in a society where all their former roles such as doctor policeman, wife and others have been stripped away and they are in their most primal. By eliminating sight, Saramago is able to peel of the layers construing the identities of the individuals in the story and revealing the underlying attributes and nature which brings out their true self. Since they lose their names, they are only identified to the audience by their roles or perceived roles since with the advent of the epidemic, everyone but the doctors wife gradually loses their capacity for function normally in a social setting. With a looming food shortage some of the men who form a gang show their true selves by using food and their combined power and readiness to brutalize the rest of the internees as well as exploit them. Before they were afflicted with the disease, they were obviously not killer rapists of robbers. “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are” (Saramago 210). Saramago suggests that the blindness exposes people for what they really are and since their inhibition were reduced and their vices overtly expressed. Whichever societal roles and identities they held are however dissolved in the face of the plague and they are portrayed diabolical desperadoes completely disregarding morality and becoming in essence worse than animals. The reader will most certainly be driven to ask, so who are these people really, and what does the fact that they are willing to go to such nefarious lengths to enforce their power about them say about them? While their willingness to use force to guarantee food security could be explained as a case of survival for the fittest at work it does not account for other actions such as raping women who they demanded form their husbands in exchange for provisions which they invariable controlled. The rape had little to do with securing their food security but it was just a means by which they could demonstrate dominance over the rest of the internees and what better way to show another man how much more dominant you are than by raping his wife knowing he is impotent to stop you? One of the prominent notions under existentialism is the concept of the absurd in which there is no meaning or rational explanation to be found within the world beyond that what we give it; this encompasses the immorality and injustice that transcends the world defying human logic and moral beliefs. The absurdity contrasts with the convectional human presupposition that good things don’t happen to bad people or bad to good. Furthermore, the events several of the deterministic events in the book happen without a ration explanation pitting the characters and the readers against a world of absurdities. For example the blindness seems to suddenly emerges from nowhere and pick a random man than continue to spread to all he comes to contact with although no one can tell how. This absurdity is further compounded by the fact that the doctor’s wife remains immune to it despite her intimate interaction with the doctor and the many blind people in the quarantine center. Consider the soldiers who represents the government and who are supposed to guard and feed the inmates of the asylum, when the doctor tries to ask for antibiotics for the Car thief’s leg, he is threatened are prevented from going any further. Finally when the infection is too serious, the car thief himself tries to plead his case to the soldiers and they promptly shoot him in the face. Before he had lost his sight the car thief stole a car from the first blind man and he was even trying to avoid the police who would have normally arrested him. Here, two levels of irony which embody the underlying absurdity emerge, for one initially he was not a car thief but a “Samaritan” who volunteered to take the blind man home and then stole his vehicle although he has not planned do so. When he loses his sight, he however ends up being led home by the police who would normally have arrested him. Clearly as postulated by existentialists, nothing has any meaning beyond what is assigned to it, the institution of law enforcement may be viewed as such only in as much as they are actively engaged enforcing the law. As demonstrated by the soldiers at the asylum, they can turn into oppressors abusing human rights and even committing murder driven by fear and their self-preservation instincts. Conclusion The absence of humanity in the bind city serves to underscore to the reader the importance of having it as they encounter the moral degeneration that bring out the worst or people exposing them not only to their own weakness but the brutality of others. However as the plagues fades away at the end of the story and people slowly regain their sight a sense of normalcy seems to resume since people have more inhibitions when they can both see and be seen. Works Cited Cathcart, Thomas and Klein, Daniel. Socrates and a Platypus walk into a bar. London: Penguin Group. 2007. Print. Saramago, Jose. “Blindness”. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. Orlando, FL: Harvest/Harcourt. 1995. Print. Read More