The narrator suggests that the patients are better off in the hospital, where they “pass the time” by remembering what they last saw before going blind. When terrified soldiers massacre a group of blind internees, the Government announces that they were fighting “a seditious movement. Yet, as a private, handwritten aide-mémoire, the Diary opens space for an experimentation and recording of cultural diversity that is unthinkable in the context of the Essay's calculated self-fashioning.

There is a revealing moment when José Saramago, Portugal's austere Nobel laureate, relaxes into laughter, and it comes as he is talking of his own death. The soldiers are a constantly-changing crew that is charged with preventing the blind internees from leaving the hospital.The Ministry of Health is the agency of the Government that takes charge of the initial response to the white blindness epidemic. The motorists kept an impatient foot on the clutch, leaving their cars at the ready, advancing, retreating like nervous horses that can sense the whiplash about to be inflicted. Like Camus, to whom he cannot help being compared, Saramago uses the social disintegration of people in extremis as a crucible in which to study the combustion of our vices and virtues. From this point onwards, apart from a few inevitable comments, the story of the old man with the black eyepatch will no longer be followed to the letter, being replaced by a reorganised version of his discourse, re-evaluated in the light of a correct and more appropriate vocabulary. McKellar cut one of the last lines in the novel from his screenplay: "I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind.

Saramago explained, "I always resisted because it's a violent book about social degradation, rape, and I didn't want it to fall into the wrong hands. The novel follows the misfortune of a handful of unnamed characters who are among the first to be stricken with blindness, including an ophthalmologist, several of his patients, and assorted others, who are thrown together by chance. The internees try and fail to attack the thieves, who have blocked the entrance to their ward with several beds. Here, “the seven pilgrims” make themselves at home: the doctor’s wife helps them clean up, and during a rainstorm in the morning, the women bathe themselves and wash everybody’s clothes on the balcony.McKellar, who wrote the screenplay for the film, had also acted in the past and was cast as the character. Back at the doctor and his wife’s apartment, the doctor’s wife reads the rest of the group a story, and the girl with the glasses and the old man with the eyepatch reaffirm their love for each other. José Saramago's Blindness starts out with one man spontaneously going blind in the middle of rush hour.

The man yells out that he has suddenly gone blind: his entire field of vision is a sea of whiteness. When Saramago provoked a storm in Portugal last year by saying the country would inevitably become a province of a united Iberia, some thought his remarks were motivated by a lingering anger. He does not want to perfectly capture the painting in his audience’s eye: he is speaking for himself, not for the others. Glover described his character: "The Man with the Black Eye Patch comes into this new world of blindness already half blind, so I think he understands where he is within his own truth, within himself. The film also contains visual cues, such as the 1568 painting The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

After the blind man’s appointment, the car-thief also suddenly goes blind, as does the doctor later that night. A screening of his first cut in Toronto resulted in ten percent of the audience, nearly 50 people, walking out of the film early. Frail and unflaggingly upright in posture, he is in an armchair in his compact, postwar house in Lisbon, sheltering from the city's Atlantic drizzle beside a smoking log fire. The man with the gun is the leader of the ward of hoodlums that seizes control of the food supply in the quarantine.