Writing Colour-Blindness

So I'm writing in third person, but my protagonist is colour-blind (red/green blindness to be precise). Should I describe everything as though the narrator is also colour-blind? Or should I describe the red and green things, but mention that the protagonist cannot see them properly/tell them apart?

The character wasn't originally colour-blind, by the way. They have seen red and green before.

I'm colorblind (red/green deficient) yet I can still see red and green on their own. Pattern em up or whatnot they use for the tests and I'll fail em.

My grandfather was worse than me for the same condition.

So unless the narrator is also the character suffering colorblindness do not write colorblind. Show how the one character is affected (can't see various patterns, can't match up colors of that type exactly, routinely screws up his choice in colors like on clothes, those sorts of things) not write the world through his eyes when speaking third person.

Try mentioning it once, that the narrator had once seen the beauty of green and red but now can hardly remember it amidst the hues of yellow and blue. Maybe you can add this in as a subtle motif; that whenever colour is mentioned, it's either yellow or blue.

if your doing color blindness from a first person perspective, have the character say "Blue" while the other characters look at him funny and say "Green".

My uncle is completely colorblind - can't tell opposite colors on the spectrum apart. The world is in grayscale to him. To my understanding, this hasn't really impacted his life much except that all the pictures in his home are in charcoal.

^^ Usually when I'm having difficulty telling greens or reds they tend to turn into a shade of brown, not blue or yellow.

So am I right in thinking that greens will look more blue for the protagonist, and reds more yellow? Or do greens look like a different kind of yellow?

Wikipedia is quite informative, but all the jargon gets in the way of me pinning down what colour-blind people actually see. Thanks for the quick replies, they're very helpful.

@QQQQQ Funny you should mention coloured motifs. I had one in mind: two characters have vivid blue eyes for a very good reason.

edited 30th Dec '10 4:42:25 PM by TBot_Alpha

I have (a type of?)red-green color blindness, and no; There are shades within the red-green-brown area that look like each other when they normally don't, but that's where it stays. The more primary shades of red are also very distinct from the more primary shades of green.

It hasn't been a problem except when, say, someone asks for the green one, or I describe something as green.

^depends on how severe it is. I know a colorblind person for whom all shades of green are shades of red or brown. Can't see green at all, and a lot of other colors are indistinct. Not quite greyscale, the impression I got was that he saw a sort of sepia-toned selective-colored world.

Unless your narrator is the protagonist, there's no need to write as though he was colorblind.

I may have worded that badly. Better wording would have been: "should I describe the scene in yellows and blues (as the protagonist would see it), while ommitting any details that would be missed by said protagonist?"

Given that I intended there to be other characters with normal vision, hopefully you can see my conundrum.

edited 30th Dec '10 5:58:50 PM by TBot_Alpha

Depends. Limited omniscince third (the narrator can see, for the most part, only what the character sees, like the Harry Potter series— colloquially, the narrator is riding on your colorblind man's shoulder) or first person, then the narration can see only what the POV character sees (even if it's third person), and is also colorblind. Do not describe unseeable colors.

With an omnicent third narrator (if it describes, for example, the thoughts of another charcacter—things your colorblind guy couldn't possibly know) or if the limited switches to the point of view of a non-colorblind character, do describe colors.

(Oh, I see you're doing third. Then it comes down to how omnicient your narrator is.)

edited 30th Dec '10 6:15:05 PM by DaeBrayk

Oh. If you're narrator is describing what the protagonist sees, then yes, use colorblind imagery. For things from the other characters' viewpoints, no. In general, no.

The book The Giver has a colour able child working out that he can see more than other people in his colour blind society. Check it out it's a quick read.