The day of the triffids

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A strong light in the sky has made everybody, except for a few people who have had the chance not seeing it, blind. There is chaos in the streets, people searching for food and other supplies to survive and everybody is trying to adapt to the new way of living. Bill, lucky just having had an eye operation, is still in the hospital-bed with the bandage around his head. This is the beginning of a new way of life where Bill and all the others need to take the responsibility and make decisions. This is hard for most of the people used to live in a structured society where there are rules to follow and where life is easy. Now they need to struggle to survive and for those who are not blind, difficult decisions, if to help the blind or just leave them dying on the streets, need to be made.

When Bill wakes up after the operation with a mysterious calmness around him he faces his first big decision, should he just stay in bed or should he take off the bandage and risk his seeing capabilities to be able to see what’s happening. Knowing that if he takes of the bandage he could get blind, he takes the risk and is lucky. I think this first thing show very well what kind of person Bill is and Wyndham puts it so well that when you read it, you feel unsure on what you would have done yourself. When Bill is on the streets on his own in the big city, his first thought is to help the blind people to find food. This I think would have been the first thought for any educated person who has learned ethics at home or at school, to give help to the ones who need it. But this is a new world and Bill soon discover that it is impossible to help all of them and that his help only would be temporary as the food supplies would run out. It would only be a matter of time before the blind ones would die. When Josella comes into the story we get to know her from two sides, first from what Bill can see and then from what people who don’t know her see.

As the author for the book “sex is my adventure”, people immediately get a negative image of her when they hear her name. Bill who got to know her before she told him she was the author for the famous book, got a very positive picture of her. Together they do things that would have been considered wrong in the previous world like steeling. At a university some seeing people have gathered and decided not to help the blind people. This is where we meet Coker who still believes that all seeing persons should help the blind and he uses his knowledge and language to try to convince the once behind the university gates to help him and his blind followers. Behind the gates the seeing people have organized so that everyone has a task to do. Bill and Josella get the task to collect food in big lorries so it is a kind of small society where the blind persons are not invited. At the university they meet the Colonel who asks them for their names and their addresses which shows that some of the people can not leave the old world and its rules. I think that Wyndham, by showing what morality different people have and what decisions they make, creates a good image of how that person is and acts. Now when life is hard for the humans, life gets easy for the triffids who now become equal to the humans. The triffids are big plants that have all senses that the humans have except the view one, so now when the humans are blind the triffids can rise to the top. Bill is one of the few people thinking of this problem with the triffids as they can now easily ki...