warrior

I really liked the book, especially the strange way in which it was written. I got lost in the dialog sometimes, which, to me, represented the feelings of blindness and disorientation very well.
The beginning of the book was incredible at showing a society-wide panic that overtakes everybody, regardless of their character. There was also an interesting combination of pragmatism and lack of it, with the former becoming more and more present the further in the book we went - the people who weren't blind yet could have tried brokering some kind of deal with the blind, since the whiteness was only a matter of time for them too, but instead they spent all their time terrified of coming into contact with them.
I was curious what would happen when they realized each and every one of them was a ticking time bomb, about to turn blind while surrounded by people who weren't blind yet, but they didn't really have time for that.
I liked the sense of equality born from them sharing a similar fate, and I loved how you could feel the wife of the first blind man growing more and more empowered, and how the girl in the dark glasses grew more and more accepting of herself.
I think there was interesting commentary on how we tend to vilify anything that affects us badly (or terribly, in this case) - the characters started speaking very negatively about blindness and blind people in general, not just the white blindness that they suffered from. It felt very uncomfortable, at times, and, as an individualist, I found the constant idea that we only see through others to be very disturbing.
Honestly, the whole last quarter of the book was incredibly disturbing to me - I'm usually very good at keeping books completely compartmentalized and only coming back to them in a purely intellectual way outside of reading, but I felt incredibly dirty the last two days of reading this book. I just finished it, and I'm still overcome by the desire to just scratch and scratch, which I think shows just how incredible the prose was.
All in all, it was a great book that made me both think and feel. It will be exactly an year since my grandfather died in a few days, and a lot of the ideas in this book either mirror or continue my thoughts from an year back. It is a great philosophical read, but definitely something that needs quite a bit of time devoted to it, as it is quite heavy and slow to finish.