Guest Blogger: Marina M.

WARNING: this blog was written in the wee hours of the morning and may contain things that don’t make sense…Hooray for procrastination.

So of coarse I’m blogging about Candide. But instead of choosing just one theme and going deep into it (which is basically what our paper is anyway) I decided that I would just whip out a ton of themes; that way we can blog about them together and get some ideas for the paper. They aren’t in depth, and not all of them explain why he is using this theme… so feel free to add whatever you desire. I didn’t use SparkNotes or anything (which in retrospect would have saved a lot of time, darn it!) so there is a lot that I still don’t understand… like that monkey butt nibbling thing??
Also, I’m sorry it’s really really really long, but it is mostly bullet points. Good luck!


“ALL IS FOR THE BEST”
- it keeps somehow working out for him… whether it was the 2 innocent Jews being
burned so Candide could meet his love, or Candide using his horrific Bulgar
experience to become a captain…
- when the best of all possible worlds wasn’t cutting it, he moves on for best of all
possible universes

IRONY
- mostly verbal things you need to catch, like “such harmony that hell itself could not
rival”, “heroic butchery”, the “honest” eunuch selling the girl… there’s a lot
- vicious sailor who didn’t help the honest Anabaptist
- earthquake on same day as flogging
These are just a few…

RELIGIOUS HYPOCRACY
- priest buried in beautiful church, Jew in dunghill
- Anabaptist is only one to help
- A lot of short lines you need to catch, like the Christian prince who wanted weapons to destroy another Christian power… the holy water that was actually nasty salt water…
- Tends to satirize Islam a bit…
- How being a priest is more like a power status since he (Cunegonde’s brother) was also a colonel, he had the power to have someone beaten and excommunicated. It wasn’t a spiritual thing…
- OVERALL he’s not really bashing religion, but rather the system it’s under. Remember that Eldorado is Voltaire’s ideal; they had a religion, but it wasn’t filled with the hypocrisy of material wants and status

FREE WILL vs. OVERALL GOOD
- Candide seems to believe in both, but how does that work?
- Balance between “trusting in Providence” and doing “as you say”

UNIVERSAL REASON
- It happens over and over that they need to know why…
- People come to conclusions on life based on their surroundings… For example
compare Martin’s belief in evil to the goodness of Eldorado
- Not really something you can learn from another (the fortnight discussion on the
boat really didn’t do anything but entertain. Although Candide did get a base
belief from Panglos, its definition changes as he continues his journey…)

HAPPINESS
- everyone can complain about their lives
- LOVE keeps providing hope (love could actually be its own theme. There are some interesting quotes about it, like “I loved him to the point of idolatry” and “to fondle the snake that devours us until it eats our hearts away”…doesn’t have to be love of people, could in fact emphasize a lack of it. It can also be a love of life… which I guess leads back to happiness)
- Define bad, define happiness (it seems to change as Candide visited different places)
- Contentment. It changes with people’s surroundings; no matter the situation people always said they had the worse. Even Eldorado didn’t claim they were the best, but the were still happy with it.
- It tends to be a theme that if you leave your original place, you lose happiness (either Eldorado, or Candide’s original home...)
- “so these happy men decided to be happy no longer” (interesting quote from when the men decided to leave Eldorado)
- Joy is stronger than grief (example: the joy of finding one red sheep was stronger than losing the other 100)
- We learn that criticizing doesn’t make you happy

MONEY
- sailor risked his life for money, but not honest Anabaptist
- of coarse Eldorado… (“these children must be well brought up if they are taught
to despise gold and precious stones”… Europeans and their irrational lust for dirt
that would drive them to kill… what is he satirizing I wonder?)
- Candide points out how perishable riches are and how only virtue should last… yet he still keeps the diamonds (even though he is horrible with money!!!)

INNOCENSE
- yet he still kills
- often says he does stuff “innocently”
- what does this mean? Is he truly innocent, or just stupid? (Momma says stupid is as
stupid does…)
- “combined judgment with unaffected simplicity” is one of our first descriptions of
Candide
- he listens to everyone but himself, and doesn’t question until like 2/3 of the book
(wow Cacambo’s advice was just as good as the old woman’s)

NATIONALITY
- Russian= mean, French=nice… (unless you go to France…) But German is
always polite and courteous… hmmm
- I guess could even talk about manners and power in general… (and compare
with Eldorado! This is what Voltaire believes is ideal, note how the king preferred
hugging to groveling, what does this say?)
- could also go a completely different direction and talk about how he goes from
country to country and the lessons he learns on the way (“what happened to the
world of worlds?”)
- The innocence and happiness of Eldorado is preserved by not leaving, while
Candide becomes more and more depressed on his travels
- Also Voltaire talks about racial equality! (the black slave who lost a leg and hand
and talks about humanity being brothers since we are all decedents of Adam…)


CACAMBO
- ok so I guess you could do an analysis on ANY CHARACTER in the novel,
especially since Candide goes from one “philosopher” to another… maybe even
compare and contrast and show how they affect his philosophy along the book
since he’s too simple to have a mind of his own (THIS IS THE MAIN PART OF
THE BOOK HINT HINT)
- anyway for me Cacambo is just weird. So he says stuff like “when you don’t get
what you want on one side, you join another” but then he’s oddly optimistic about
things like women and reverend fathers killing for land or something…
inconsistent I think, like he’ll use “free will” to choose something, but still has
enough faith where he’ll say right after “perhaps God will have pity on us in the
end”… weird, but still interesting. I guess he’s a good link between complete
Panglos and Martin
- unlike Candide he never loses his head and leads him places… even though he’s
technically the servant
- Knows how to speak to people’s appeals vs. Candide who not only does a horrible job of reading people, but tells the same stories over and over to everyone and gets himself into trouble because of it

SCIENCE
- In Eldorado the man was content to be ignorant… but they also had huge
buildings dedicated to science
- Debate on Homer and scientific explanations…
- They even tried explaining the red sheep
Candide was curious by nature

SEXUALITY (if you really want to go there...)
- could narrow it down to the role of women in the novel and if they are
“degraded” and what that does for the novel, whether it’s Cunegonde or
Pococurante or even the women in Eldorado… (by the way Cacambo said that
“women are never at a loss, God looks after them”… you could throw that in
somewhere)
If you made it this far, than I am proud of you 