Candide - Reflection

To be honest, I found this novella quite frustrating and even somewhat depressing at times. The satirical nature of this piece of literature creates an exceedingly sarcastic, and at times, humorous tone that adds to the condescending intentions of the author to create a work which points out what Voltaire sees as flaws in the society of that time period. At first, I truly enjoyed the exaggerations and not-so-subtle editorializations concerning the socioeconomic misplacement of values. However, after a while I felt as if I was reading the diary of an extraordinarily well-read teenage girl. It seemed like every footnote’s sole purpose was to explain the historical context of an insult I would otherwise be ignorant of.

After realizing that I was comparing a renowned historical philosopher to a pubescent woman, I started to think about why Voltaire could be so frustrated with so many different people. That was when I connected the Enlightenment to the theme of this course. It seems to me that if one was to anthropomorphize the time period of the Enlightenment to a young adult, a lot of the reasons I disliked this novel start to make sense.

Voltaire buried his agenda and issues with certain philosophical fallacies of his contemporaries underneath several layers of sharply worded satire. The Enlightenment was a time period in which new philosophies and paradigms of thought were growing into fruition faster than most people knew what to do with them. This ‘age of reason’ led mankind to ask and attempt to reason through certain fundamental questions of life, such as wondering if the universe can ever be understood.  With the development of solutions to these questions, there were bound to be disagreements and animosity between contrasting philosophical views. Voltaire obviously had a bone to pick with the idea of optimism being a legitimate explanation. The character of Pangloss embodied this train of thought and always seemed to have a completely rational, irrational justification for whatever obstacle is thrown in his path. The absurdity of these ‘solutions’ tend to act as catalysts for Voltaire to point out inherent flaws in the use of rationalization to answer questions that had been considered intrinsically irrational for hundreds of years. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of this novella is the character of Candide. While it is obvious that Voltaire uses this character’s innocence and pureness to contrast his critiques of the overuse of reason, I view the character in a more symbolic light. In an elegant use of incongruity, I believe that Candide represents an ironically placed solution to the errors of pure rationalism. Candide is the human element that Voltaire seems to consider absent from the ‘age of reason’. 

Despite my initial dissatisfaction with this piece, I admire how much Voltaire was able to convey without explicitly saying what he believed. After wading through his mountain of satire, I found the underlying thematic elements quite interesting and was able to connect with the coming-of-age theme despite its context being more of an intellectual movement.