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    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness"
    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness"
    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness"
    Ebook43 pages46 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535819640
    A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jose Saramago's "Blindness" - Gale

      08

      Blindness

      José Saramago

      1995

      Introduction

      José Saramago has been a bestselling author of plays, short stories, novels, poems, and other works in Portugal for many years. Some of his works have been translated into more than twenty languages. A well-known atheist and communist, Saramago wrote religious or political satires. He published several critically acclaimed novels before 1991 when his highly controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was banned as blasphemous in a number of countries. Yet, in 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for Blindness, an allegorical novel. The Portuguese edition, Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Essay on Blindness), was published in 1995 and translated into English in 1997. Blindness raises questions about the frailty of social structures and the strengths and weaknesses of human nature. The central question is: What would happen if everyone suddenly went blind? To imagine an answer to this question, Saramago writes a story about an epidemic that creates chaos in the capital city of an unknown country in the late twentieth century. It is a worst case scenario of government and social failure in which the best and worst in humankind is portrayed. This tale has no specific setting, no names for the characters, and no chapter titles. It is written in Saramago's unique style that uses little punctuation, long sentences that can continue for a paragraph, and paragraphs that can run for pages. Since 1995, Saramago has continued to publish extensively, including a sequel to Blindness published in English in 2006 as Seeing.

      Author Biography

      José Saramago was born on November 16, 1922, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, Portugal. His parents were landless peasants, José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. His name would have been José de Sousa as well, but a registrar took it upon himself to give the newborn the name of a wild radish that was also the family's nickname within the village: Saramago. In 1924, the family moved to Lisbon; shortly thereafter Saramago's older brother Francisco died. Although Saramago did well in school, he had to withdraw at the age of twelve because his parents could not afford the expense. He then enrolled in a technical school where he spent five years learning to be a mechanic. The school also offered courses in French and literature, and Saramago developed a keen interest in the written word, spending many hours in the local public library. After graduation, he worked for two years as a car mechanic then as an administrative civil servant. In 1947, Saramago published his first novel, The Land of Sin, but he did not publish a novel again until 1976.

      In the interim years, Saramago worked as a publishing production manager, a translator, a literary critic, and as a newspaper editor until he was fired for his communist views. During

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