People are used to all the comforts in life that are taken for granted, so used to them that something as small as a power outage can cause serious confusion and panic, imagine never having power again and what chaos would ensue. There are novels that provide examples of what society could spiral down to in an extreme case. Two of these novels are The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Blindness by Jose Saramago. These novels show what losing such amenities can do to a society. Removing the comforts and amenities of everyday life, will bring society to chaos and remove boundaries that were placed on individuals by that society.
While there are many similarities between both novels, there are also key differences that separate them. One of these differences is the size of the groups that it is safe to travel in, and the sense of community that is lost because few can be trusted. The characters in The Road travel in smaller groups, and have no sense of the community that they were raised with, because a smaller group makes it easier to escape should they be attacked and easier to feed in the irradiated wasteland. In Blindness however larger groups, which provide some community, but still no trust, provide the greatest safety because if attacked the more force or number of blind men or women you have, the more likely you are to survive, and inside a city they are easier to feed. Secondly, human contact, its frequency and whether or not it is wanted, is another major difference between the two. In The Road contact with anyone else never ends well, usually there are weapons involved and one or both parties must flee afterwards. One example of this is when a man stole the father’s cart, the boy watches while his father threatens, “ If you don’t put down the knife and get away from the cart I’m going to blow your brains out” (McCarthy 257). Contact is avoided at all costs because it usually results in injury, death, or loss of food and supplies. In Blindness, contact with people doesn’t always end badly, although more often than not it is not helpful to survivors. At one point in the novel a survivor traveling with the doctors wife goes to check on the flat where he used to live, to his surprise it is now occupied, “ in that case we shall have to find somewhere else to live, No, don’t even think about it,” (Saramago, 289). In this case both the man in the house and the man with the doctors wife come to an agreement that benefit both, this does not happen often however. A final major difference is the behavior of people in the novels. The characters in The Road are already ruthless and have had to become that way to survive for years without the comforts they used to rely on. If they have to kill to survive then they will kill without hesitation, the boy’s father tells a man they find one day “ you think I won’t kill you but you’re wrong”(65), the man who wanted to eat his son. In Blindness, people do not merely assume that they can kill anyone and get away with it; the characters adopt a certain ruthlessness, because they lose their comforts over a shorter time, but not to the same degree as the characters in The Road. They will fight for food and a place to stay, but few are willing to kill for it. All of these things result because these people have had things that they took for granted in their every day lives away from them.
The differences between the two books are many, but they result from the loss of some everyday amenities that are the same. One comfort lost by both those in The Road and Blindness is the comforting presence of police, or law enforcement in general. In The Road the police took their weapons and their families, joined into bands, and ran as fast as they could. This left the people who couldn’t find weapons or groups to fend for themselves in a world where police didn’t exist anymore, they were just more men with guns. In Blindness however the police did not run away, they jus went blind like everyone else. The officers being blinded still had the same effect of leaving people to fend for themselves, except now there were more victims then men with guns. A second comfort lost was the government, the men and women, who see that there is food in grocery stores and water for all, are totally disabled. In McCarthy’s novel the government cannot function because it has not only had its ranks decimated, everything that it represented is totally destroyed. Anyone left that may have restarted the government followed the example of the police officers and escaped with their families, meaning no rescue for the abandoned and no hope for the dying. In Blindness the government like the police, has all gone blind which means that they cannot function simply because they cannot see. This means that there is no research being done on why no one can see, which means there will not be a cure. The final common comfort removed, one of the most important, is food, no longer easily attainable at the local store or even farm, it becomes a precious resource that cannot be wasted. In The Road food is precious because after years of being scavenged, houses are bare at best, and empty shells at worst. Luck plays a large part in the survival of any person who wanders the roads, the boy and his father find all their food but all through pure chance, the father recognizes this every time they find food, “ he’d been ready to die and now he wasn’t and he had to think about that “(144). In Jose Saramago’s novel, the absence of food is not the problem; it’s getting to the food that is difficult. Being blind makes it hard for people to find food that they would otherwise just walk to and grab. The doctor’s wife discovers piles of corpses at the bottom of a flight of stairs “they must have found the basement, rushed down the stairs looking for food”(314). She reasons that they must have thought there was food, rushed down the stairs and fallen, something that would not have happened if they had there sight. Losing these comforts, these everyday amenities, causes chaos and mistrust to run rampant throughout both societies.
The result of losing so many things is utter chaos; murder, the destruction and reform of religion, and collapsing of morals and boundaries. In both novels characters must murder to survive, whether it is in self-defense or to defend the food that keeps them alive. In The Road, the boy’s father kills many people, most in defense of himself or his son, but others are because he wants revenge for some wrong that person did to him. After killing a man holding his son hostage he comes to a gruesome realization, “ This is my child, I wash a dead mans brains out of his hair. That is my job” (75). In Blindness the doctor’s wife must murder a man who is terrorizing them, in defense of not only herself but also every woman in the building they are hiding in. She comes to this realization “ if it were necessary, she would kill again” (192). Later on in the novel she is forced to kill again, but she has hardened by that point and it does not affect her as much as this one does. Secondly, chaos shows itself in the form of collapsing and changing religion. What was once solid and unchanging is now either destroyed or changed so radically that it no longer remotely resembles its origins. In The Road, cults of all kinds rise up after the removal of comforts. Most of these cults preach worship of death and the apocalypse; there rituals are sacrificial, with gruesome results. Throughout the novel the boy and his father pass corpses that have been skewered and hung over cliff edges, or entire walls made of human skulls, skulls of every shape and size. There is no trace of former religions, except old, ash covered, rusted metal hanging on the walls. In Blindness, religions collapse and rise daily; the blind preach to the blind anywhere they can. Churches that originally housed praying masses, are burned down or destroyed, in a church were every painting or statue inside has had its eyes covered, the doctors wife wonders at the priests motivation “that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions…to declare that, ultimately, God does not deserve to see.” (318). The final and seemingly worst of the chaos induced damage, is the loss of all moral and societal boundaries. The Road is full of things that, if not for the situation would be deemed the actions of the insane, actions of people who would otherwise never leave a prison. An example of this presents itself when the boy and his father inspect the camp of people, who fled when they saw the two, “ the boy turned and buried his face against him… what the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (198). Other examples of destroyed boundaries present themselves in the form of cannibalism, rape, and sacrificial offerings. Blindness has almost as many collapses but the most disturbing is the belief that whoever says they are in control is in control, virtuous or corrupt, they rule. An example of this is when housed with many other people a man with a gun demands payment in a form he would be otherwise be arrested for, “ Unless you bring us women, you don’t eat. Humiliated the emissaries returned to their wards.” (167). The man gets what he wants, because he holds power. More examples of societies downfall are shown when bodies are left to rot in streets, murder becomes commonplace, and people don’t even notice when someone dies beside them. All of these results sprout from the loss of simple everyday comforts, things that are always there, but never truly appreciated.
Both The Road and Blindness are excellent examples of what the loss of simple things like water or food, normally placed at our doorstep, could do to society. If comforts, the everyday things we don’t appreciate, were to disappear society would descend into chaos.