SOURCE: "Blindness: The Eye of Henry Green," in Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 403-21.

In the following essay on Blindness, Brothers examines the themes of the work, concluding that the novel "is a dramatization of the individual's poignant, failed quest for meaning and understanding."

Henry Green's first novel, Blindness, begun while he was a student at Eton and published at twenty-one while he was still a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, relates the story of a young man of seventeen, John Haye, who aspires to be a writer. On his way home from school John is blinded, his eyes pierced by glass from a window broken by a boy tossing a stone at the train in which John is traveling. Green's critics, reading Blindness through the model of the modern psychological novel, have interpreted the meaning of John's accident as a pivotal point in the interior drama...