Humanity in the State of Nature: Notes on José Saramago’s “Blindness” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

I examine two dystopian novels that share some common starting points: they both refer to afar-distant past, before civilization as such began; they attempt to describe the re-establishment of human moral behavior in the extremely hostile conditions such a pastentails; and their respective authors believe that the only possible basis for re-establishingmorality may be found in the relation of hospitality between the self and the other. The twonovels are Blindness, by José Saramago, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. In spite ofthe difference between the historical contexts in which these novels were written— Blindness was written in 1995 and The Road in 2006—and between the authors, they present strikingsimilarities, even though they ultimately seem to reach different conclusions. Indeed, the twonovels pose the same fundamental political and philosophical question: how is moralitypossible in a condition almost similar to the state of nature? Saramago’s answer issuggested in the behavior—not the language— of the doctor’s wife, the only character whokeeps her eyesight; McCarthy, on the other hand, chooses a child as the moral agent in aworld characterized by death and deprived of order.