4 ideas
When a white blindness spreads through a city, the government locks the first victims in an empty mental asylum under armed guard. The ophthalmologist's wife, who can still see, pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband. She watches a ward of armed internees seize the food supply and demand the women's bodies as payment, and she ends it by stabbing their leader with scissors and leading her small group out after the building burns.
In the novel, once sanitation, food distribution and sight fail, hygiene and dignity collapse quickly for most of the internees, which shows how much ordinary decency depends on material conditions people rarely notice. The doctor's wife and her small group still keep caring for one another and making moral choices, so the book presents infrastructure as a heavy support for ethics, not the whole of it.
The epidemic is presented as a metaphor for what people already were: 'blind people who can see, but do not see.' The disease does not cause the moral failure. It exposes a failure that was already there, in which people saw each other only as roles and property.
Faced with a contagion it cannot explain, the state confines the blind and lets soldiers shoot those who approach the gate, treating the sick as dangers to be contained. Food deliveries break down, and brutality also arises among the internees themselves, so the novel sets official violence alongside the violence within the wards without claiming that one produced the other.