Jose Saramago’s Humanitarian Thought Study

As the first Portugal writer who won the Nobel Literature Prize,Jose Saramago is very poor during his early life, though he has rough and rich experience, but he always with a strong, kind and humane thought. His work is full of imagination, sympathy and irony of the interpretation, the unique style of novel struck a chord with readers around the world. Based on Saramago’s novel the blind,this article is going to analyze the spirit’s connotation on thoughts of new humanism in his works. There have been a lot of concepts of humanitarian in the history of western world. Such as emphasizing humanity liberation of Renaissance humanism, emphasizing reason of Enlightenment humanitarian, having the ideal colour’s utopian socialism humanitarian and so on.As a new age writer, compared with the seniors, Saramago has his own different features.In his era, science and technology gradually kidnapped the human nature, human lost the reason, people didn’t understand the value of existence and got into blind, in order to survive and searching for greater interests endless fight happened among people. In this era environment, Saramago’s works of human nature explore more deeply, he always pay close attention to the realistic society and the fate of people, use a variety of subjects, exaggerated but splendid imagination, unique narrative language to face with the real life, dissect the naked human nature, praise the warmth of human kind virtue, satirize all kinds of evil in human nature, mean, hypocrisy, cruelty, greedy, brutal, and at the same time, he can see the defect of moral people may have a good quality, and kind people have to take the helpless measures when in the face of reality, as a result, under the guidance of his humanistic thought the characters are more full, its humanitarian also more complete. Human suffering is Saramago’s eternal focus,on the one hand, he critizes the cruel world, on the other hand he is also full of compassion for the world,he sorrows about as human beinghave created thousands of years of excellent cultural achievements, after so much hard exploration in philosophy, religion, society, history, politics, psychology, the relationship between people and people, people and society, people and environment, people and himself still exist so many disharmonious factors, is still filled with endless evil human nature. With a strong sense of social responsibility and conscience of intellectuals, brave struggle spirit, he positively face to the cruel and evil, despicable, hypocrisy and greed of human nature, he did not deny them, instead of trying to explore the deep reasons of the human destruction and in-depth thinking. Saramago’s literary creation is rooted in the tide of modernism and postmodernism, his first concern is the distortion of spirit squeezed by the modern society, the loss of reason, the burst of virtue, with bold and direct touch of the anatomy of the people’s inner world, to expose the absurdity and irrationality of the society, at the same time, his humanitarian face all humans rather than confined to a hero or tragic character. On the writing style he has both the bold imagination and realistic strokes of Garcia Marquez type, and have strong sad and depressed absurdist of Franz Kafka, on the artistic features also has strong modern and post-modern style, formed a novel style full of imagination, metaphor, irony, symbols, and made a significant contribution to the literature of Portugal and world.