As discussed, Blindness is a modern version of mythological stories dealing with mankind's limited and deplorable situation on earth, and thus any work emphasizing this theme can well be considered its literary precedent. In an analytical account of the history of poetry and fiction, Saramago himself is on record as saying: [T]he literary genre we refer to as the novel, having moved in one direction as far as it can go, like an imaginary pendulum, is now swinging back the way it came, perhaps repeating all those moments already experienced before returning to rudimentary verse, where it will recommence its familiar journey, leaping several centuries or millennia ahead into the future.

With these words, our novelist hints at the universality of all human experience as recorded in literature. And thus he remarks: So far our route is clear; it began one day with a loud...