Annie, 'The Road' vs 'Blindness' - #2

We finally finished reading the book. Yeapee!~~~~~~~~~
On the first week of ‘the Road’, I compared ‘Blindness’ with ‘the Road’. This week I will compare them again. Well, this time I will focus more on comapring and contrasting the different endings of each book.

On the end of ’The Road’, the man died and the boy went with other good guys. In some ways, it can be called a ‘Happy Ending.’ From the start we knew that the man was sick and that he was going to die. Thus, it wasn’t that surprising when the man died. If you look from the boy’s view, it is sad that the man died but at least the boy survived. And, we can know that the boy is going to be protected well by those people. Maybe, the boy will be happier than when he was with the man. However, what I will focus on is the apocalypse.

In ‘The Road’, the situation didn’t get any better at the end of the book. Even though the man died, it was still the same world. Everything was still gray, no difference. Unlike this book, everything was back to normal at the end of ‘Blindness’. People start regaining their sight. It can just be seen as a typical ‘Happy Ending’ since there is no more blindness, the cause of everything.

However, when I looked at the very last part of the book closely, the woman who was able to see all the time through the book said ‘People were blind to start with, and they are blind, now. These people can see but they don’t look.’ Somehow, to the author, the catastrophe didn’t seem to have ended. It was there to start with and it’s still here. Throughout this book, the author focused on showing how the woman helped other people and how the main characters formed a group and worked together. Maybe, what he was trying to say was related with this fact. Even though the world itself didn’t change, the author wanted the readers to learn this fact and change their view towards the world. This book made us rethink about the world around us.

I think this part can relate with ‘The Road’. In this book, the world didn’t change at the end. It was still the same. Just like ‘Blindness’, the author wanted to focus more on the relationship between the man and the boy than on the setting. I felt that these two books are different from other apocalyptic books or movies because it wasn’t trying to solve the initial cause of the apocalypse. In most of the movies of this kind, it’s more about solving the cause and returning the world back to a normal world. But, these two books seem to make us think about how we would act in an apocalyptic world. They don’t talk about how this apocalypse happened or how it was solved, it was there to start with and it just is there. It is the cause of how people act but everything’s not about this apocalypse.

But, I think the two apocalypses are somehow different. For ‘The Road’, the catastrophe, which wasn’t cited clearly in the book, was the background. I mean, the humans remained the same and it was the setting that changed at first. However, in the ‘Blindness’, it was the humans that changed first. No matter this small difference, the cause led to similar post-apocalyptic situations. The world ran out of food and people started hurting each other. So, I guess the reason why I keep coming back to ‘Blindness’ is because it’s so similar in structure and the message that I gain from it.

P.S. This time, I focused more on talking about my thoughts than rather on what ‘Blindness’ was about. Well… I knew I was supposed to be explaining the summary but, I didn’t want to write the same information again. For people who didn’t know what Blindness was about, you can look on the first week’s assignment. I’m really sorry~ ///And, I really don't know what I'm trying to saying... so tell me about the things that doesn't make sense :)