We can see that these views are clearly reflected in the text of Blindness. It is worth noting that the PCP never supported a total parliamentary democracy, but rather a type of arrangement where a vanguard of the proletariat would be elected to represent the will of the people. We can sum up Saramago's political views as being critical, anti-authoritarian, but non-democratic. After this last act of censorship, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Canaries. Some years later, he also ran afoul of the ruling political body, when his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was prevented from contesting the European Literary Prize for worries that the novel would anger the Roman Catholic Community. Luckily this was not the case with José Saramago. Many of its members were tortured or imprisoned for their affiliations. This decision was made at his own personal risk, since the PCP was a vocal opponent to the then-dictator Antônio Salazar. He joined the Partido Comunista Português, or the Portuguese Communist Party, in 1968. During his time of obscurity, though, Saramago already began cultivating unpopular viewpoints. It was only in his fifties that he garnered international acclaim for his novel Baltasar and Blimunda. Much of his early career he spent in relative obscurity, writing for papers and producing novels of little impact.
Saramago was born in a small village called Azinhaga in rural Portugal. A few salient points in José Saramago's biography, though, can be related to events in the plot–in this case, the names are of no concern. This is especially noteworthy in this novel, since the style of Blindness seeks to head off any connection to the real world by keeping the reader ignorant of the time and place of the narrative – the city nor the characters have names. The novel Blindness, for example, can be related concretely to certain political circumstances of its author, José Saramago. While it is often wise to avoid cavalier references to an author's biography, such an approach can be useful in elucidating connections that particular pieces of literature have to their time and place of production.
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