Magical Realism as a Lens for Understanding Dystopian Society in Saramago's Blindness

Abstract

Blindness was a novel written by Jose De Sousa Saramago in 1995. This novel told about an incident in which almost whole citizen got mass blindness. This blindness came suddenly without any apparent reason. The appearance of the mysterious disease, called white blindness, in the whole city was something unusual or magic. The existence of several narrative parts explaining about magic led the researcher to this research using magical realism as a theory. The appearance of some narratives telling the readers about crime and the city destruction also becomes the reason for the researcher to conduct this research, these narratives could be the evidence that dystopian were also the focus on this research. This research used qualitative research as method because the data are not numbers. In analyzing this research, the researcher broke down the novel into some parts to find five primary elements of magical realism. She found five primary elements in this novel. She also explained that dystopia characteristic found in this novel like no privacy among citizen and other. After finding some sentences contains each characteristic, the researcher found the relationship between magical realism and dystopian in the equation of sudden blindness within a city in this novel. The result of this research answered the researcher’s assumption. This means that Blindness could be analyzed with magical realism and shows the existence of dystopian characteristics in the novel.