29 pages • 58-minute read
The Country of the Blind
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Literary Devices
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of ableism and racism.
Irony
Nunez’s experiences in the country of the blind are filled with irony, meaning that the outcomes of his choices often contradict his expectations. For instance, the first time Nunez tries to undermine the people who are blind is when he steps away from the path, hoping to sneak past his companions and use his sight to hide from them. As soon as he steps away from the path, however, they immediately locate him, using their acute sense of hearing to detect his position. Instead of establishing his superiority through his ability to trick them, the incident exposes Nunez’s lack of understanding of the culture he finds himself in.
Nunez expects that his efforts will get the blind people to recognize him as their ruler, affirming his sight as the sign of his power over them. Instead, they consider his mind “newly formed,” as if he were a child, because of his perceived clumsiness and lack of understanding. Irony directly reveals The Folly of Colonialism as Nunez’s colonialist ambitions are frustrated when he is placed into the lowest class of their social hierarchy, the direct result of his ignorance of the society.
Legend
Wells opens his story with a legend, introducing the titular “country of the blind” as a semi-mythical location (447). The first impressions of the setting in the story are defined almost exclusively by the account of the lost settler. In this way, the settler’s stories offer exposition to ensure that the reader knows as much about the community as the outer world does, so that they know as much about it as Nunez does when he enters it for the first time.
The lost settler’s legends also drive the mythical status of the community by depicting it as a utopia. According to the settler’s account, the valley “had in it all that the heart of man could desire” (439). This drives Nunez’s motivation to become the king of the valley, an echo of real-world examples of colonialism fueled by fantastical tales of riches and utopias.
Anti-Hero
Nunez is characterized as an anti-hero, a type of protagonist who lacks the noble characteristics of traditional hero figures. Typically, anti-heroes exist to question the status quo, critiquing society’s assumptions of what constitutes moral nobility. In the case of Nunez, his defining characteristic is his arrogance. He believes that his sight gives him power over the people of the valley, but this belief sets up the trajectory of his character arc, in which his humiliation and growing understanding undoes his arrogance. Nunez ends the story no better off than when he began, returning to the mountain from which he fell. However, he no longer believes that he is meant to rule the community, much less live among them, signifying his growth.
Dilemma
Nunez’s final choice in the story is a dilemma, a situation in which he must choose between two equally appealing outcomes. The elders propose surgery to remove Nunez’s eyes, allowing him to experience blindness. They frame sight as an illness that affects Nunez’s mind, suggesting that sight is a negative quality that needs to be purged from Nunez in order for him to attain moral purity.
However, Nunez’s conflicted feelings toward this proposal drive the dilemma he is facing. He knows that the moral framing around sight isn’t necessarily true because he delights in the visual beauty of Medina-saroté. He uses this argument to appeal to her for sympathy, but because Medina-saroté has never experienced the visual beauty he speaks of, she cannot advocate for him. In effect, Nunez is left alone to decide between two equally worthy outcomes with equally demanding costs. If he gives up his eyesight, he can continue to live the rest of his life with Medina-saroté, but with the knowledge that he can never delight in her visual beauty again. If he gives up life in the valley, he retains his access to visual beauty, but he must recuse himself from the life he desires to live with Medina-saroté.
From a narrative perspective, Wells uses this dilemma to heighten the stakes around Nunez’s surgery. From a thematic perspective, the dilemma paints complexity around the moralization of disability. With this dilemma, Wells seeks to dispel the notion that sight and blindness exist as two poles of a dichotomy. Rather, he argues that sight and blindness are both valid aspects of the spectrum of the human experience.
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