The Country of the Blind

In the latter half of “The Country of the Blind,” Wells focuses on Nunez’s attempts to assimilate into the community. For Nunez, this is more challenging than simply accepting that he cannot force them to believe that sight gives him greater power, as within their own community, there is no evidence of that assertion. Instead, Wells shifts the power dynamic, and Nunez becomes the one forced to assimilate into another community’s values and beliefs. Through Nunez’s journey, Wells shows how assimilation involves a loss of identity, as it necessitates the abandonment of one’s own cultural values and beliefs. Nunez is faced with the challenge of renouncing the very things he used to define himself upon arriving in the valley, including his sight, highlighting the distinct challenge of assimilation into a new culture.

Before his assimilation, the community sees Nunez as both ignorant and offensive in his beliefs. Although the community never forces Nunez to adopt their ways as he tried to force them to believe in the superiority of sight, they do see him as being “newly formed,” someone who has yet to learn the ways of the world. When he challenges their traditions by explaining how the world appears to him as a sighted person, they take offense at his words, calling them “wicked.” They continuously remind him that he has much to learn about the world, suggesting that what he does know has no value in their world. In a last-ditch effort to assert his own beliefs, Nunez resorts to violence to convince them of his superior power, but when even that fails, he submits, realizing that he cannot continue to live among the community and yet be apart from them as a sighted person.

Through his depiction of Nunez’s gradual assimilation, Wells highlights the social conditions of his acceptance in a way that reflects the real-life process. Nunez is integrated into their society, but he is accepted at the lowest rung of their social ladder, working as a serf for his appointed master, Yacob. Nunez falls in love with Yacob’s daughter, Medina-saroté, and decides that if he can marry her, he can live content in the valley and abandon all thoughts of returning to the outer world. Medina-saroté falls in love with Nunez because she can delight in sight as an object of the imagination. However, their shared love clashes with the existing social system because they cannot accept the daughter of a master falling in love with an outsider only recently and conditionally accepted. They offer Nunez a choice: If he can abandon seeing forever by deliberately blinding himself, then it will prove that he has fully assimilated into their society. With this drastic turn, Wells highlights the sacrifices that people are forced to make to be fully accepted into a new culture. If he wants to be with Medina-saroté, he has to be willing to give up seeing her with his eyes ever again. Wells offers the trajectory of Nunez’s assimilation to emphasize both the depth of the sacrifices that such acceptance entails and the way that people are forced to leave fundamental parts of their identities behind in order to achieve it.