Blind to the Blind

In Ch 22 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, the idea of physical blindness mirroring psychological, moral, and/or intellectual blindness. For example in the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino’s character, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade is legally blind as well as psychologically and socially blind to others around him. The film also shows Slade as a sagacious character as he, in fact, advises his caretaker, Charlie, on whether or not to rat out his peers in order to receive a letter of recommendation to Harvard while he is taking a trip with Slade in New York.
Charlie takes Slade a little less seriously because of his disability as well as the fact that he lets Charlie know that he is planning on committing suicide later on their trip. Charlie is therefore blind in his own way to the knowledge of his later on mentor. (https://reelclub.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/to-see-or-not-to-see-sights-and-symbolism-in-scent-of-a-woman/)
       

Commonly, both in cinema and literature, stories have a basis in reality. The aforementioned film depicts this in a blind, resentful veteran with tons of experience. However, the events of the Al Pacino movie are likely seldom in the general day-to-day. With this being said, people are blind to the right thing directly in from of them on an hourly basis.
John Green’s books are severely lacking in more ways than one, being a YA novelist usually sets a precedence for this however. I’m saying this because he drops a blind character, Isaac into one of his more popular books, The Fault in Our Stars, for no particular reason other than to crack jokes about the visually challenged. Usually, when a blind character is thrown into the lineup there is a reason. The Who’s Tommy’s title character is blind but has a remarkable pinball talent and the story centers around the disabilities. Isaac, even though a side character, merely eggs an ex-girlfriend’s house. This occurrence donates nothing to the plot.
Back to The Who’s Tommy, this rock opera talks about his inability to see, speak, or hear. It’s the theme of the work. I’m not trying to say that the blind don’t deserve representation in the media or stories that don’t involve character development solely from being blind, but it feels like a wasted opportunity.
I could be wrong, there may be depth in The Fault in Our Stars that I am totally missing because I’m still not sure exactly sure why Isaac existed in the state that he did.
As stated in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, blindness is everywhere in every story ever told, but not literally. Blindness exists off the page as well. A lot of people don’t catch symbolism the first time they see or read something thus leaving them blind after all.
I often wonder if authors necessarily mean all of the symbolism people get out of their books, perhaps leaving them blind to the effects of their work on the mass es. I feel like a lot of it is pulled out of the blue who overanalyze the works. For example, there is so much symbolism in the book Moby Dick (including blindness) that I find it very hard to believe that one man could plan something like that out and execute it in the way that Melville did.