In this work, Saramago portrays the struggle of a people against oppressive forces (the large landowners, the forces of law and order, and the Church). It is a determined struggle, marked by great sacrifice and set against a backdrop of rural poverty. The novel is a portrait of the anti-fascist movement in the Alentejo, through which Saramago clearly reveals his political convictions.
About this work, Saramago wrote:
"A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I had finished it: This is the Alentejo."
He added on another occasion (published in the newspaper O Tempo in November 1981):
"I think that everything rises from the ground; even we ourselves rise from it. And since this book is what it is—a book about the Alentejo—and since I wanted to tell the story of the condition of a part of our population over a relatively long period of time, what I saw was that the entire effort of those people, whose lives I was trying to describe, was fundamentally the effort of someone striving to stand up. In other words, all the economic and social oppression that has characterized life in the Alentejo, the relationship between the large estates and those who work them, has always been—at least from my point of view—a relationship of oppression. Oppression is, by definition, crushing; it presses down, it tramples. The movement that reacts against this is the movement of rising: lifting the weight that crushes us, that dominates us. That is why the book is called Raised from the Ground*, because, in the end, people rise from the ground, the grain fields rise from the ground, it is in the soil that we sow, it is from the soil that trees grow, and even a book can rise from the ground."*